Based on the majority of my previous online purchases of Apple products that have shipping delays I’d have to say that Apple is somewhat conservative with its delivery estimates. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple brings some of these dates in.
I hope my experience with previous delivery estimates turns out to be true for this latest round of updates.
I’ve also seen products that have very lengthy delays available immediately through the carriers or in Apple’s stores. Even though I’m in a fairly rural area I have 3 Apple Stores less than an hour away. For some reason the one mall based Apple Store seems to have lower demand and sometimes that helps getting harder to find products.
Finally, Apple seems to have a pretty good idea of which configurations of new and updated products are going to have the highest demand and pushes more of those out to the stores. Sometimes Apple is wrong and certain configurations are easier to find because the actual demand is lower than anticipated. I believe the black MacBook Air 15” fell into this category. If you’re not married to a particular color you can also find what you’re looking for in a different color.
But face it, if you’re shelling out nearly $2000 USD for an iPhone you’d better get exactly what you want. At that price you should be getting a thank you note from Tim Cook.
I had no problems. I’m on the Upgrade Program and set up my order two days ago.
My phone should arrive on the 22nd, at my door.
Pro Max Blue.
Website worked perfectly.
Yeah, so am I. But I still hit issues with the app “looking up my pre-order information”, until I just restarted the whole process from scratch. Even tried from different devices before giving up and starting over.
Opted for in store pickup on the 23rd, as delivery had slipped to past Oct 9th.
To those considering paying Apple's rather high prices for increased storage, remember the 15 Pro (& Max but not the non-Pro versions) has USB-3 data transfer speeds via its USB-C port. We already know that video can be recorded directly to an external SSD. An external 2TB or 4TB SSD will cost less than Apple's 1TB internal upgrade and may better suit all use-cases.
I ordered my base model 15 Pro Max, 256GB, 'Natural Titatnium' yesterday with an ETA of 3rd November. Today I had an update with an ETA of 24th November. They must be selling fast, or at least faster than expected. It is unlike Tim Cook, 'Mr Logistics', to make a mistake like this.
I’m glad at least someone was able to get into the store and successfully complete an order. By the time I stopped getting the “be back soon” message at around 8:20 and then get past the time out messages and session expired messages I was able to place an order…I think. No order shows in my history so I’m not sure.
Yeah, the ordering process was a debacle. I did the pre-order configuration on the Apple Store app ahead of time as I usually do so that I can just open the app and complete the check-out process right away. For starters, the app wouldn’t let me start the process until about 4 minutes pass the hour. I got to the point of check-out with Apple Pay and then I go an error message saying that my session had timed out. Worse, it wouldn’t let me try again with the pre-configuration, so I had to start over. Now, the process was erroring out at the point where you’d choose your carrier. Multiple times. I tried using the web site also and the store wasn’t ready the first few times I tried. I’d get the “almost there” screen. Eventually, at about 15 minutes pass the hour, it let me in on the web site and I was able to complete the transaction. iPhone 15 Pro Natural 512GB. Delivery set for 9/22. I guess I was one of the lucky ones.
My thoughts are that there was either a ddos attack on their servers or demand was much higher than normal. Apple isn’t new to this game and they generally strive to provide a positive customer experience. If it Apple was simply supply constrained, I’d expect the purchasing process to be smoother.
Since no-one knows the pre-order inventory level, I t’s kind of silly to get excited about delivery dates starting to slip…
Exactly. This happens every single time. The way Apple plays this is beautiful. Hell, they could have a thousand available for order! LOL.
There’s no financial incentive to under-producing and making people unhappy with long waits. The financial incentive is to produce as many as they can ahead of time, which is what they do. (Obviously it’s never enough)
LOL. Okay. Yeah, that's what they're doing.
Ummm, no. What they are likely doing is estimating—probably was some reasonable degree of accuracy—how many they need and producing just enough, or probably slightly less. They want to sell as many as possible without excess inventory. They want it tight. And then what happens is they sell an optimal amount while also giving the appearance of amazing demand while they unleash additional production orders to pace with actual (vs. estimated) demand. Plus they know people will wait. So they optimize for all of these factors. They are certainly not "producing as many as they can ahead of time." It's incredibly naive to think they are. Apple is and amazingly savvy company in this way. And they have successfully bamboozled some people into thinking that they have produced as many as possible but still can't make enough. LOL
I don’t agree. There would be no reason for them to do that. They KNOW that no matter how many are produced for them, they will sell them shortly. This isn’t near the end of the year, it’s a new phone. The problems are in manufacturing, if it does happen. They can never tell if some small glitch will occur, slowing production down for a day, which would result in tens of thousands of phones being one day late, and pushing the entire production line back by a day. Maybe they can make up for that in a week or so, but not right away. But it’s not enough to interrupt the sales of millions of phones the first day.
this didn’t seem anything like that. I turned the app on 15 minutes early as I’m sure most people did. Nobody was ordering yet. The store opened over 10 minutes late. That has nothing to do with product shortages. Then it couldn’t get to the order and said to try again later. Since I was certainly one of the very first to have tried to get in, I doubt they already were selling the first batch out. But then, when it said, at the very end, that my session timed out and I had to do the entire order over from scratch, that wasn’t due to shortages either.
so no, shortages had nothing to do with this. Perhaps, Apple will explain what happened, and possibly not. But it was a glitch if some sort in the store process, not lack of product.
i have cell service from Verizon on my iPad from which I was ordering. No problem. My wife, doesn’t want cell service in hers as she almost never takes it out of the house. She had a problem with Verizon. When she changed here order to her iPhone which, of course, does have Verizon, it went through without a problem. Something to think about.
With regard to the ordering and system issues, I agree. That's not something deliberate.
I was referring to the consistent apparent product shortage on almost every product release Apple does. Within a day or two order deliveries get extended out by weeks. This is a pretty consistent pattern. I suspect they are estimating demand and then dialing back product orders from their suppliers—just a little—to be a bit conservative and safe. This will lead to longer lead times once the initial inventory on hand is allocated to the initial orders. It's a logistics, manufacturing, supply chain, and financial optimization thing. It turns out that it also confers a marketing benefit: "Look how much people want this! We sold out almost immediately!" It's a brilliant psychological play: Scarcity (even if it's short-term and somewhat artificial) breeds more demand. It's actually a smart business move.
I don’t believe it. Apple doesn’t know what percentage of phones will sell in what percentage. They have to make estimates based on past sales which aren’t too accurate as new product differ from older one. So they make a certain number of each product, and then within that particular oroduct, levels of storage and color. That’s a lot of different msrps. They’re bound to be wrong somewhere. So there are imbalances in product availability due to that. More people buying natural color and less buying white? Oops. Cut back on white and make more natural. Same thing for everything else. This gets sorted out over time. But production lines being what they are, it can take from days to weeks to make a difference. Days in the case of differing storage amounts and weeks to deliver different colored cases.
so n o, they don’t cut back for the reason you gave. But I was a nanufacture4 for years and I can tell you that’s it’s a dance between the manufacturer and their customers. The customers lead the dance.
Comments
Opted for in store pickup on the 23rd, as delivery had slipped to past Oct 9th.
My thoughts are that there was either a ddos attack on their servers or demand was much higher than normal. Apple isn’t new to this game and they generally strive to provide a positive customer experience. If it Apple was simply supply constrained, I’d expect the purchasing process to be smoother.
so n o, they don’t cut back for the reason you gave. But I was a nanufacture4 for years and I can tell you that’s it’s a dance between the manufacturer and their customers. The customers lead the dance.