“Perhaps in response to some recent reports noting that the shipping times for the iPhone 4 had slipped from 24 hours down to 1-3 days in the US, Apple has apparently removed shipping estimates from from their Online Store for all products,” AppleBitch reports.
“Lengthening of the shipping times for established Apple products could sometimes be used in the past to predict when a new product will launch. This move essentially now removes that predictor by simply stating that a product is in stock rather than the length of time it will take to ship,” AppleBitch reports. “Given that sales figures of a product can decrease dramatically when rumors of a refresh occur, Apple may be trying to remove this occurring.”
Full article with before and after screenshots here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Looks like Cook is as tight as Jobs on potential leaks.
Maybe even tighter, but this was likely set into motion awhile ago.
We still have the shipping estimates in the Canadian Apple store, but they may disappear in moments as well. I have been frequently bemused by the Thunderbolt Displays shipping estimate of “2-4 weeks” for the past month or so.
But how is customer delight affected by this?
Not favourably – customers don’t like it when “in stock” means 1-2 weeks as was the case for the MacBook Air last I heard, vs. 1-2 days for the iPhone 4 yesterday.
This sounds like something Dell would do – make the customer fill in the order to find the ship time is too long and then cancel
Apple has messed up here – in an attempt to limit speculation, they’re hurting customer delight. I sure hope this is a bug, they reverse it.
Oddly the 12 CPU Mac Pro is still listed as 2-4 days but all other main store page items in top two rows only say “in stock”
Much ado about nothing: “in stock” simply replaces “24 hours”, maybe “1-3 days”. For products with limited availability, that is with longer ship times, the ship times are listed.
All is well, customer delight not impacted, even enhanced as result of several equivalent messages combined into one.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/09/apple_removes_estimated_shipping_times_from_its_online_store.html
Or . . . it could just simply be a software feature temporarily removed to work on a web glitch or software update.