Early on there seems to be plenty iPhone 5cs to go around


Fortune:

Last year Apple ran through its supplies of the iPhone 5 in less than an hour -- which Wall Street took as a sign of enormous pent-up demand. When the stock market opened at 9:30 a.m., Apple's shares rocketed to a new record high of $696.98, adding $40.98 billion to the company's market cap in the space of two days.

Three days later, Apple announced that it had sold a record 2 million iPhones in 24 hours, double the record set one year earlier by the iPhone 4S.

This year, by contrast, there were still plenty of iPhone 5Cs in stock an hour later. Also four hours later. And as I write this, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern, you can still pre-order a 16GB or 32GB iPhone 5C in any of five colors and on any of four U.S. carriers' networks and be guaranteed delivery by Friday 9/20.


This will be a curious launch. Apple has never launched two new iPhone models at once, and last recent launches have offered a pre-order. Here we have two models and one, the flagship, is not available for pre-order. Plus, each year Apple seems to get better at this. Three years ago was an unmitigated disaster -- largely affected by mobile carrier's look up system. Two years ago it was better, but the system was unreliable for about the first 3 hours. Last year went pretty smoothly, although sold out fast.

Basically, I'm not sure how observations of Apple's system reflects reality.