“Apple appears to have completely caught up with consumer demand for its flagship iPhone 5s, with a new survey of the company’s retail stores finding all models completely in stock at all locations,” Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider.
“The research team at investment firm Piper Jaffray has conducted bi-weekly polls of 60 U.S. Apple Stores. They found that as of last week, all models of the iPhone 5s were 100 percent in stock at all locations polled,” Hughes reports. “That availability even includes unlocked iPhone 5s models, which can be purchased at full unsubsidized pricing starting at $649 for the 16-gigabyte entry-level capacity.”
“Analyst Gene Munster said the survey shows that supply of the iPhone 5s has improved ‘dramatically’ from just two weeks ago, when only 24 percent of Apple’s retail stores were found to have all iPhone models in stock,” Hughes reports. “In contrast, just 8 percent of Apple’s stores had full iPhone availability at the start of October.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
I believe this the result of china granting licenses only for TD-LTE. Buyers of the 5S on china telecom and china Unicom must have stopped buying.
Apple will have to scramble with producing TD-LTE phones for these carriers too. I do not think the ones they have been producing had the TD-LTE variant.
Ah yes. It must be because people have stopped buying them. It has absolutely nothing to do with the simple fact that the factories are now turning out more than a half million iPhones a day.
/extreme sarcasm
You misunderstand. Up until the china announcement I believe apple was churning out iPhones for both china telecom and Unicom with Lte capability but not TD-LTE.
All I am saying is that had china announced licenses for the vanilla lte, apple would still not meet the demand. This were we we will see the genius of Cook. How fast can they shift production for china telecom and Unicom from plain LTE to TD-LTE.
Either channel fill is bursting at the seams or the Samsung Galaxy S5 must be imminent. Either way it doesn’t look good for Apple. Actually, nothing ever looks good for Apple.
/s
Certainly not when you are the author.
Pundits take: Apple is doomed, they can’t sell all their phones and have excess inventory. Sell AAPL.
And Apple is about to release the iPhone 5 (S and C) into the wilds of the greater China Market, right? Hmm. No demand there. Nope. Nary a single lusted after iPhone. I wonder which version of Chinese sells the best there? Think I’ll stock up just before they go live in Hong Kong. I wonder how many iCloud buildings are needed?
The shortage never existed, it was created by Apple’s marketing department in a well-executed program of leaks and press releases. They come up with something silly like “low retina display yields” or “difficulty getting the correct gold tone on the phones” and they leak it to some analyst or mac blogger in a drunken bar conversation, as if Apple had just dreamed up those features and the tech was so cutting-edge that the manufacturers couldn’t get it right. Please. Do people really believe Apple forgot to prepare for Christmas?
That was not our experience. While we were all right to wait, our local stores did not have the iPhone 5 % models we wanted in stock when we visited last month.
Face it, having slim inventory in the 4th quarter is not a retail strategy. No retailer would be stupid enough to intentionally turn a way customers during the highest shopping season of the year.