Record crowds at Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store for new iPhones 5c and 5s

“Dawn had broken by the time I made it to Apple’s flagship Fifth Avenue store Friday morning. The barricades were already in place, and the crowd of would-be customers had filled Apple Plaza and circled the block,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt report for Fortune.

“I started a head count at 7:00 a.m. and 10 minutes later reached 1,068 at the end of the line, half-way up 58th Street,” P.E.D. reports. “That’s 50% more than the 710 I counted at the same time last year for the iPhone 5 launch, which itself was 52% higher than the line for the 4S.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: YKBAID.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “JES42” for the heads up.]

Related articles:
Open thread: Are you in an iPhone line? If so, send us pics! – September 19, 2013
How to avoid waiting in long lines to get your new iPhone – September 19, 2013
iPhone 5s demand quickly outstrips supplies around the world – September 19, 2013
Queues grow for new iPhones at Apple Store Fifth Avenue – September 19, 2013
Carriers and non-Apple U.S. retailers will have almost no Gold or Silver iPhone 5s units in stores for tomorrow’s launch – September 19, 2013

20 Comments

  1. Thats not the longest lines. I was at the Prince Street NYC store at 8- the line was 4 blocks. they at least said if you weren’t in the top 100 people all gold & silver are gone.. The line was double the lines from last fall. Go Apple- if you make it they will come. Wall street must be freaking out- wrong yet again

  2. I’m curious to see how the news media and analysts are going to spin this into bad news. I’m sure they will because they can spin anything Apple does into bad news. I’m sure some dick-wad analyst will claim that Apple was expected to sell about 10 million iPhones this weekend and came up short by 2 million. Probably the same analyst who claimed Apple would be lucky to sell 3 or 4 million of such boring iPhones that didn’t have an iota of innovation in them.

    I’m certain many analysts said there would be almost no lines at all because the 5s was just a minor upgrade and that no one wanted a plastic (I know, polycarbonate) iPhone 5c. I don’t know if the analysts are stupid or just trying to manipulate investors. Apple’s whole company is basically set up to be a sales machine with so many loyal customers it’s almost hard to imagine sales would be poor. I realize that phone-nerds wouldn’t consider these iPhones anything special, but the average consumer should be more than pleased as long as they’re not expecting a large display. I wonder if sales would really jump that much more if Apple did offer a larger display.

    1,068 standing in line for a smartphone is no small feat no matter how much the news media and Wall Street wants to downplay it. Any other company would be praised to the heavens except for Apple which could still have its stock downgraded within a week or so if iPhone sales don’t continue at a record pace.

      1. @ breeze:- Really! and here I was thinking that it only flowed out of Africa in Egypt!
        If you are right Breeze, then I need to go back to school to learn that the Mississippi is not a river in Cairo because all this time I thought that it was!!!

      1. Put it this way – if you were Apple and in the midst of
        a stock buy back program (as they are), would you rather
        pay the current price or that $700 a share price?
        The dark spin analysts are helping who?

    1. Rightfully so. It’s the very definition of failed leadership to run out of a product in high demand. And, it’s probably deliberate – designed to create the impression of being overwhelmed by the demand. Pure crap. The right decision would be to make more than enough because they would ALL sell between now and the iPhone 6. Manipulation doesn’t really work but it does expose stupidity at the top.

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