Apple delays Airport Express shipments for some customers

At least three MacDailyNews readers report receiving this email yesterday or today:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Thank you for ordering the new Airport Express!

We are very excited about the response to this great new product! We had
planned to ship your order by July 15th. We now expect to ship your Airport
Express Base Station on or before July 23rd.

Please rest assured that we fulfill all orders in the order they are received.
If we do not hear from you prior to shipment, we will assume the revised date
is acceptable, and will ship your order.

To check the status of your order, visit http://www.apple.com/orderstatus.
When your AirPort Express Base Station ships, you will receive a Shipment
Notification via email explaining how you may track the package.

We appreciate your patience and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this
delay has caused you. Thank you for your interest in Apple products!

Sincerely,
The Apple Store Team

MacDailyNews Take: While not a huge delay, in light of recent shipping delay “issues” (caused by IBM, Hitachi, or otherwise) this doesn’t help public perception, and so we hereby repeat Steve Jobs’ own quote: “Real artists ship.”

21 Comments

  1. “Real artist’s ship” – which artist? And what was the name of the ship?

    MacDailyNews Webmaster: Fixed it @ 10:28 am EDT. Thanks, “Punctuation pedant.”

  2. This is no big deal at all. With 80,000 pre-orders, I’m sure they didn’t have that many laying around in the warehouses yet. Many of the initial orders have been filled, but just not all 80,000 of them. A one week wait isn’t anything to get excited over anyway…

  3. (First post, but I read MDN several times a day; I’m a longtime Mac developer and a shareholder).

    I ordered an Airport Express the day they were announced and it arrived yesterday, probably in the first wave of shipments from Taiwan.

    It is just amazingly perfect. I spent about 5 minutes unwrapping it and configuring it to extend my existing Airport Extreme base-station’ed network. That’s all it took, everything is now automatic. I can just plug and unplug the Express anywhere in the downstairs of my house (the base station is at one end of the house) to extend my wireless coverage as I see fit. I can get 3 or 4 bars on my two laptops pretty much anywhere that I want, now, including way out into my large back yard and into the far ends of the house. iTunes streaming works like a charm. The ease and mobility are the real key, here. You just plug the thing in, it spends a little while initializing itself and it’s ready again, the LED glows green and you know it’s just fine.

    There is nothing -not- to like about this, it’s just like: magic. I can easily see people buying a few of these and sprinkling them around their house/property.

  4. Sigh … can’t buy Arport Express, dual 2.5’s, or iMac. I guess I could wait just a little bit longer….

    Do-doodoo-do-doodoo-doodoo — Can’t buy this.
    Do-doodoo-do-doodoo-doodoo — I’m fukced.
    Do-doodoo-do-doodoo-doodoo — Can’t buy this.
    Do-doodoo-do-doodoo-doodoo — That sucks.

    (came outta nowhere and stuck in my mind)

  5. Apple informed me about a delay of only 24 hours; when tracing the shipment via FedEx, this shows up:

    Ship date

    Jul 16, 2004

    Estimated delivery date
    �Jul 20, 2004 by 10:30 am

    Delivery location
    SAN FRANCISCO CA

    Service type
    IP Direct Distribution

    Date/time
    Status
    Location

    Jul 16, 2004
    8:37 pm
    Left FedEx Ramp�C.K.S. INTL AIRPORT TW�

    5:24 pm
    Left FedEx Origin Location�
    CHU PEI CITY TW�

    5:14 pm Arrived at FedEx Ramp�
    TA YUAN HSIANG TW�

    12:23 pm Picked up by FedEx�
    CHU PEI

    This shows they were actually 23 minutes late, Taiwan time!!!

  6. I got the same mail. I actually wanted to cancel the order, but Apple makes you fax or phone them … they do not have a system to cancel the order via email nor web-based proceedure.

    I called, was of course put on hold for over 20 minutes. Tried again, on hold for 10 minutes. Hung up. Sent them a fax to cancel the order and some unpleasant words about their sales cancellation tactics (of course, they want to make it more difficult than the purchasing experience to dissuade you from canceling).

    Never again the Apple Store. Just don’t have time to write faxes or wait and wait on phone calls to cancel orders.

  7. I received one of two AE’s that I ordered today

    the reason I received one of two is that apparently the FedEx driver delivered the first one at 9AM and then came back to deliver the 2nd one at 10:30 but for some reason he marked it as an invalid address and didnt even knock on the door………

  8. I got the two I ordered right on time.

    Unforeseen demand is OK with me compared with massive unsold inventory and Apple putting money to carrying that than innovating new products.

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