We were amazed last night to see both Apple and AT&T
sell out of iPhone 4 pre-order units despite the
sustained ordering issues, and now we know why: Apple managed to move 600,000 iPhones in just a single day. Yes, that's a lot -- Apple says it's the largest number of pre-orders it's ever taken in one day, and AT&T says it's ten times as many orders as it took for the iPhone 3GS. It's not all sunshine and roses, though; Apple's also apologizing to the large numbers of people who simply couldn't get through yesterday, and AT&T's
suspended pre-orders entirely until the device is in stock. We're guessing AT&T might also be putting the stopper on things while it gets those
pesky security issues under control, but there's a chance the carrier is just trying to deal with the insane order volume coming from Apple's servers -- it served up 13 million eligibility checks yesterday, shattering the previous record by three times. All in all, it looks like Apple has a hot item on its hands here -- almost too hot to handle. Here's Apple's full statement:
Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple's new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions. Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock.
Update: Looks like that "ships by" date just slipped once more from July 2nd to July 14th. Yikes.
posted June 16th 2010 12:11PM
Epic. Two million in the first week of sales. Easily.
@MarkAnderson
That's one heck of an impressive number!
@MarkAnderson I can feel the flames lapping at my feet! Tell my wife.... I love her..
@MarkAnderson
30 Million when to seller try to sell this phone over $1000, 10 million are idiot who think that is the actual price without contract. and 20 million can't get enough apple (itune)
@MarkAnderson
wow! thats amazing even for apple! and hey, i would have been one of those preorders too if it wasn't on ATT. Oh well! Plenty of other options.
@MarkAnderson
Isn't that just stateside numbers? Imagine the International preorder numbers?
@MarkAnderson
If verizon ever gets the iphone i bet the pre-order sales will be completely ridiculous.
@MarkAnderson ...which is why AT&T service and pricing will never improve. The ace in their sleeves lets them keep all other competitive forces at bay.
@MarkAnderson
Say what you want, but if the iPhone came to Verizon it could crush the android rebellion for at least a year. Not saying the iPhone is better, but people like them a LOT :|
@MarkAnderson
So what's next? Another delay in international launch and another committed suicide in Foxconn factory??
@artemis360
Yup, not even close. You have to be realistic.
@Eli Haj Apple is equally to blame and should not be given a pass. I blame AT&T's servers and Apple's exclusivity w/ AT&T. If we had other options, AT&T wouldn't have sold any phones yesterday.
@Eli Haj
To be fair, for me, AT&T only seemed to be the problem for half the day, when the system was checking my elligibility.
But then I finally got through at 10pm Eastern and got 2 phones ordered after fighting and cussing at Apples Shopping cart which deleted my phones twice during the final approval process.
Then I find out that somehow I have 4 on order instead of 2.
Tried to call Apple this morning at the exact instant that they opened, and gave up after being on hold for 39 min.
@BMills
oh yeah...I wanted to add that I started trying at 4:45am Eastern, and finally got them preordered at 10:30pm Eastern.
@MarkAnderson Apple clearly has a winner on it's hands!
@MarkAnderson Apple apologizes as it opens it's arms to collect all their money from the preorders.
I bet Steve does a wink and a smile at himself in the mirror this morning.
@MarkAnderson Right, because they said it's 600,000 means it's 600,000 right. There's a saying in stats and analysis: Beware of big round numbers.
it's a convenient way to both spin at&t's blundering and continue to build hype OMG l1mited edition must have 1ne.
@Mister Warmth
No it means they had 600K pre-orders. It's a pretty simple concept.
@MarkAnderson Not from me. Although I tried all day to pre-order one, AT&T never had their shit together well enough on their Premier site so I never could. It was never even an option to pre-order on their business site that is supposed to provide better access to their business customers. Just when you thought that AT&T couldn't possibly blunder more, we get this fiasco.
@dan828
Yeah but that's AT&T being a bit shit which is like saying water is a bit wet. If anyone was going to screw things up it was them.
@Corriewf
So you're saying Apple WANTS people to have problems ordering their phone? How would that benefit Apple in any way?
@MarkAnderson:
"the whole 30 pin plug/iTunes/'my way or the highway' thing puts me off."
Let's be extra super clear about this: The only thing that you "have" to use is iTunes (assuming you don't just use a 3rd party app). You do NOT have to buy content from the iTunes store. "Locked in" or "closed" suggests that you can't use anybody else's content, which is the opposite of true.
iTunes is simply the mechanism by which you sync the phone. You are free to put any content, from any source, on your iPhone. You can load whatever you want into iTunes, and either have iTunes manage it, or manage it yourself and put it wherever you want. Comments like yours tend to give people the wrong idea, which leads to Apple haters and comments like "If you have an iPhone you can only listen to Apple music HURRR"
Let's not contribute to the ignorance, shall we? And by the way I'm pretty sure you understood that already, but not everybody reading your post would.
@Jack
Do you even know what a subjective opinion is?
See point 4 for further details.
@who said what
I wonder how many are repeat customers?
@MarkAnderson if they keep it up for two weeks they will sell 8.4 million. I say they get 2.5 million first week.
What an amazing number. Huge in sales terms.
But should be small in internet terms. 300k at the Apple store, 300k at the AT&T store. That should not at all be too much to bring their servers to their knees. You would think with all that processing power those companies have in their arsenal that could not happen.
@MarkAnderson Yeah sure, but their failure is going to cost them business. After waiting a few months of contract, I find I won't be able to even get the new iPhone for several weeks because of AT&T's fuck up. So instead of waiting, or choosing from the rest of AT&T crap line up, I'll move to another carrier with a nice Android phone.
All and all, I've wanted an Android for a while now, but AT&T's line up is such garbage that I had settled on an iPhone. But I'm not going to wait for a new iPhone just to watch AT&T step on their dick again. Bad network, crap customer service, and a mediocre phone line up.
@MarkAnderson the world is out of iphones
@Jack No I'm saying they don't really care. If they had made this two separate points than fine but, " we got a lot of money yesterday, btw sorry about the crap servers".
@MarkAnderson
You missed my point in its entirety. Implying iTunes "locks you in" or is "closed" is not subjective. It's WRONG, as in factually wrong. I understand you didn't say it was closed or locks you in, but that is what you meant when you said it was "my way or the highway", yes?
This is why I said let's be extra super clear about this. You may not like the 30 pin connector, but who cares? It comes with the device, and it's USB on the other end. What are you complaining about? Are you complaining that you have to use iTunes? So use a different program. Are you complaining that iTunes is a closed ecosystem?
That's what's not clear in your post. It's just sort of a vague "I don't like the way Apple does things" complaint without addressing what you don't like about it. And that is what leads people to believe that iTunes store CONTENT is the only thing you can put on your iPhone, which obviously isn't true. And don't tell me you've never seen people making that mistake - it happens all the time, right here in these comment sections.
@MarkAnderson
So 600,000 people brought down AT&T's servers? I mean, that's a lot of iPhone sales, but don't most large websites handle much more traffic than that every single day?
@MarkAnderson
Holy SH** that's impressive. You can't even argue that
@MarkAnderson
While I disagree with your comment about iTunes, I am too put off by the 30 pin connector. I read somewhere that in certain countries it's required by law to use the standard, one of those mini USB jacks. I was really looking forward to Apple implementing this, but judging by the pictures (lol), at least no in any of the early release countries.
I know somebody who had to buy like 5 iPod/iPhone cables when he could just get any one of those cheap USB cables or his cell phone charger. Actually, now that I think about it, his phone might be a Sony Ericsson, who use their own cables too... mutha%&#$a
@GMoney "it served up 13 million eligibility checks yesterday"
That's probably what did it.
@v0rt Pretty much. I think the pre-order numbers are particularly impressive when you consider they haven't even started doing any PR on the new iPhone... So this was driven entirely by online news and word of mouth. I just switched to Sprint for an EVO (don't regret it for a second) and I'm generally not a fan of the iPhone, but Apple has definitely created something pretty iconic that's gonna drive sales for AT&T for the next few years no matter what.
@SeeKo
Thats 600,000 AFTER the 13,000,000 bombarded the servers; crashing them however many times they did. That was just 13,000,000 on AT&T's side. How many went to Apple and tried to preorder.
@Oghowie
At least 90 of those checks were me killing the keyboard ENTER button.
@BMills The smart thing in your case would be to grab all 4, sell the other 2 to those that didn't get theirs. You could probably make enough profit to offset 1 of the 2 you will keep.
@artemis360 Do you mean "at most" a year?
@MarkAnderson That's if they're not completely sold out for weeks after June 24! Severe shortages may be coming…
@MarkAnderson
Wow. Looks like June 24th will be the day the AT&T network officially crumbles.
@GMoney This is AT&T we're talking about they still haven't gotten it completely right with this phone (the tethering issue that was made available by IOS 3 last year for example) now the new data cap plans, I know they want to regulate the data strain but some of this is ridiculous.
@MarkAnderson
600,001 - I couldn't login till today.
@Hugeknox Imagine this
people sign up for iphone 4 with AT&T by paying $199 (
2 Million)
30 days later people sign up for iphone 4 with VERIZON by paying $199 (
4 Million)
The look on the faces of those 2 M ( knowing that they totally f***ed up ) = priceless
@Hugeknox If verizon ever gets an iphone while still on EVDO then Apple would have created an inferior product. Imagine an iphone which can't do simultaneous voice and data... it's be a joke.
@Impulses
I bought the Evo on launch and I just returned it yesterday. My hatred for it went so deep I went through the time to put a review for in on YouTube to hopefully keep others away:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WenAs_8IZXM
The next time you go to do ANYTHING on the phone and it can't even track your freaking finger, just remember that it doesn't have to be like that.
@MarkAnderson
That's a wonderfully impressive number indeed. I wonder how many of those orders, though, are going to be cancelled or returned when people find out they've been billed to the wrong card, shipped to the wrong address, or mistakenly ordered more than actually requested.
That two million might not go far when the class action lawsuit for all this hits.
http://gizmodo.com/5564913/proof-iphone-4-pre+orders-using-other-peoples-credit-cards-shipping-info
@Jack Ive used itunes and zune to organize my content and found zune to be a much better experience. Wish the iphone was on sprint.
@BMills dude impossible you can't get 2 iphones on 1 line.
@Jack "And that is what leads people to believe that iTunes store CONTENT is the only thing you can put on your iPhone, which obviously isn't true. And don't tell me you've never seen people making that mistake - it happens all the time, right here in these comment sections."
dumbass. NOBODY thinks that. i read these comments all the time, and i've never seen anyone say anything like that. everyone knows that you can rip cd's and download music from outside itunes to your itunes library.
"Implying iTunes "locks you in" or is "closed" is not subjective. It's WRONG, as in factually wrong. I understand you didn't say it was closed or locks you in, but that is what you meant when you said it was "my way or the highway", yes?"
i'm pretty sure you still need itunes to update the phone's software, so yeah, you're basically locked to itunes. and NO that is NOT what he meant by "my way or the highway." read that again:
"30 pin plug/iTunes/'my way or the highway'"
what the hell made you think "iTunes" and 'my way or the highway' were related at all? if they were, he would have written "30 pin plug/iTunes ('my way or the highway'). work on your freaking reading comprehension. those slashes indicate SEPARATE ITEMS.
what he meant by 'my way or the highway' was Apples general handling of the iphone/ipad/ipod in general. they do their best to control almost every aspect of the device. you can only run apps they let you run. there is almost no customization of the OS, even in iOS 4, as opposed to Android, where you can have apps that downclock your processor when the screen is off, or turns off wifi when you leave your house. obviously many people love how apple has decided the iproducts should operate, but mark isn't totally satisfied, and neither am i.
@techlord 30 million try to understand just what it is you talk about you make zero sense. (itune)