Online Apple Store estimates iPhone purchases to take up to a month to ship: Suddenly waiting in line for a couple days doesn’t seem quite as stupid
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
As cool as the iPhone is, most of us here thought those brave, jobless-yet-presumably-independently-wealthy souls who were able to camp out in front of an Apple store for a week were being a bit overly dramatic. Sure, the iPhone was going to be a hot item initially, and perhaps even sell out this weekend, but we knew that if worse came to worse, those of us with jobs, lives or families would be able to purchase the iPhone online on launch day from Apple, and get it by Monday or Tuesday. Yes, we’d miss out on the fun of playing with it over the weekend, but what’s waiting 2 – 4 days in the big scheme of things? After all, we’d still be in the first wave of early adopters, right?
Wrong.
While Apple did indeed open the online store tonight at 9PM for online iPhone orders, estimated ship times are in the neighborhood of 2 to 4 WEEKS. That’s right. By not waiting in line for a day, you may have to wait as long as 30 more in order to get your shiny no-longer-so-new iPhone.
Now, we have been pleasantly surprised in the past with Apple ship times. We once ordered a Mac Pro with a custom graphics card that caused the estimated ship time to slip from 24 hours to 3 weeks, and the machine ended up shipping in 48 hours. So we’re cautiously optimistic that this 2-4 week estimate is just Apple’s best guess at the moment, based on unknown demand.
