Like a broken record, Apple sold out of its new iPhone 5S product during the same day of launch. The online sales of the iPhone quickly went into a 7-10 day shipping in 10 minutes. Then, the shipment was expected to arrive in October after 30 minutes past midnight PST. The gold iPhone 5S, as expected, was the most popular, selling out at 4AM PST.
As per sales, the lines themselves for the iPhones were up a little bit since last year, suggesting more people equals more purchased iPhone 5S devices. But, we won’t know until Monday how the sales matched up to last year’s iPhone 5 phones. Did it beat the 5 million unit sales last year? We will see.
My friend, Ben Reitzes, a Barclays analyst, feels that a 6 million-unit figure will be the way to measure success from last year. To that end, it may not be possible since Apple engineers have been short on supply historically.
Personally, I have known many folks jumping ship to the Samsung Galaxy. These are people who prefer bigger screens and are sick of the Apple support hype machine. As Samsung continues to take more of a slice of the iPhone service market, year-over-year (YOY) sales for Apple will be tough to continue upwards.
