The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are the newest devices from Apple, but they won’t be easy to find by Friday’s release.
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For the second year in a row, lines for the latest Apple smartphone were much smaller than usual.
Customers who enter Apple Stores Friday, when the gadgets hit shelves, will not be able to purchase the sold-out phones on site, but they can continue to place orders for their desired models online, Apple said.
Retailers reported that early demand for the new iPhone 7 has been incredibly strong, with sales of the Plus, a larger model, selling out on Apple’s website.
It’s the question of the week: If you’re buying a new iPhone 7, do you choose the new jet-black or matte-black color?
“I found last year that there were crowds of people, but this year nearly no-one”.
Chatter about the launch on Chinese microblog Weibo has been far more muted than when the iPhone 6 debuted in 2014.
Analysts with Piper Jaffray and S&P Global Market Intelligence project Apple will sell 13 million iPhones this weekend, topping last year’s haul for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. An index of searches on Baidu Inc (NASDAQ:), China’s equivalent of Google (NASDAQ:), shows the new phone lagging both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 5.
As it does every year, device fix site iFixit is putting all of Apple’s new devices through the teardown process.
Shares of Apple increased almost 4 percent amid the news, closing at $115.57 per share.
Jaime González, a truck driver from the city who occupied the first spot in line, said he had been in line for three weeks – even before the phones were officially announced, when speculation was running rampant that Apple would release new phones.
Naturally, there were mixed reactions from Apple fans and critics alike, as many people expressed their concern they would instantly lose the tiny devices.
A group of school students chanting “one dream, one team” were the first customers in Australia to get their hands on the new iPhone 7. Until someone more official performs a teardown or until we can compare this version of the phone with the final iPhone 7 Plus, it is hard to confirm whether or not the information revealed by the Vietnamese site is genuine.
“It feels great to be the first in the world to have the iPhone 7”, he said.
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With so many customers reserving phones online, there were fewer people than expected waiting outside Apple’s Liverpool store – but several Apple fans were still proudly waiting outside when it opened at 8am. “It was 100 per cent worth it”.
