iPhone 5 preorders back online at Apple
A crush of early demand exhausts initial stock, but online preordering through Apple is good to go again.
Well, that didn't last long. Earlier today, the Associated Press reported that Apple had stopped taking orders for the iPhone 5 because of a crush of demand that exhausted the initial product inventory. But the site was back in business Friday morning, the one caveat being the two-per-customer limit.
Apple's site now estimates the wait-time for delivery to be two weeks instead of the original date of September 21. When Apple opened up iPhone 5 preordering at midnight, "="">the first batch of iPhone 5 models sold out within an hour, stretching delivery times to as long as three weeks.
Whatever the initial customer frustration, the intense early interest signals a big fall hit for Apple. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster noted an analysis of Twitter traffic by Investing Analytics, which said tweets surrounding the iPhone 5 on launch day were up 460 percent compared with tweets about the iPhone 4S when it debuted -- and 73 percent of the iPhone tweets were positive compared with 51 percent when the iPhone 4S launched.
Parsing the data, Munster reaffirmed his belief that Apple will meet his 6 million to 10 million iPhone 5 unit sales estimate for the rest of this month. He also expects Apple to sell 49 million units in the fourth quarter overall.