iPhone 3G: Sold out in 21 states (updated)

You got very lucky with that getting your phone in 2 days! I ordered mine a week ago, and everytime I check the AT&T order site it has been showing back order. I called both company owned stores in town and they said they have no idea when they will get more. I am going to be traveling to Dallas, but when I called the apple store there to see if they had any in stock I got hung up on! This is very frustrating! Especially when you are paying full price for the phone since I am not eligible for an upgrade!!!!!

21 days shipping update: Amazing! I just got an email that my iphone was shipped to the ATT store- the FedEx tracking says it arrives there tomorrow afternoon! So the promised 21 days delivery were just 2 (!!!) in reality- I ordered it Saturday afternoon it should arrive on Tuesday. Looks like ATT got stocked!

I just went to ATT on the weekend, the wait for an order is now 21 days, one of the reps said 21business days the other just 3 weeks. UFFF!

I really think that Apple should not have released the iphone 3G in so many countries at once. I think its great that they tried to include a lot more buyers than last time around, but i think they over did it. They should have released it in a few countries like 4 or 5 and then after demand started to slow down, they could start releasing it in other countries. I just think 21 countries is a little too much

I must be lucky. Apple Store in Lakeside, Essex, England had plenty. Bought one on the day of launch-just had to wait for registration problem. Connected next day-works fine and very cool.
Bought the 16GB in black. Amazing though, O2 -the only network provider-ran out at 4p.m.

Vermont? I thought we sold Vermont to Canada 12 years ago?

I don’t understand how in this day and age of people saying they can’t buy gas or food, that they can buy a IPhone 3G and not only that they are all sold out in 21 states. All I got to say is somebody has money and it’s not me!

A true apple guy always finds a work-around. Friday by 10 am the local ATT store in Chicago was sold out and taking orders with a 5 day wait. I called Mom in Kosciusko, MS sent her up to the ATT store, 16G black next day mail. By the time it arrived itunes was upgraded working phone by Sunday morning. Always a work-around, think it thru.

Agree w/ Kevin in Austin. AT&T is my only option. This is the worst product launch ever. I was stuck in the Apple store for 6 hrs. on Sat. bec. they couldn’t activate my phone saying I have a Corp. discount on my AT&T account when I in fact do not. Can the computer interfaces bet. these 2 companies not talk? I was told it would take 4 hrs. to 3 days to update the Apple shell system. Had the phone in my hands & they took it away and told me they’d put it back on the shelves at midnight all when there was an AT&T store right upstairs in the mall. Now it’s 4 days later, there are no phones anywhere, and bec. they have no inventory they can’t tell me in the store if they will ever be able to activate me. + all the punk kids in the Apple store are loser rude jerks, esp. the managers. Raise the price back to what it used to be to price out the riff raff and let me activate it wherever I want - people already know how to unlock it anyway. Steve Jobs better step up quick & try to salvage some of the mystique of what this super cool product used to be.

Many AT&T stores are not accepting direct fulfillment orders, meaning they are not even able to order an iphone for you to wait for.

Listen up everyone.

1. Go to an AT&T store.
2. Order your iPhone (using the direct fullfillment process).
3. Wait the 5 business days.
4. When they call you, swing by the store to pick it up.

No waiting in lines and no waiting for ‘months’ for supplies to come in to an Apple store. It doesn’t get any simpler.

It’s just like when the Motorola RAZR came out. The coolness will die down after few months :) I would like to get one, but I cannot use it without a keypad to type emails. So I will wait for the BlackBerry touch phone with keypad.

I am so glad I went to the Apple Store on the first day at 9:30pm, lined up for 90 minutes, and got my iPhone 3G!! It’s so cool, I can’t believe you guys don’t have one!!!

It is sad how this company really laugh at the customers… hahaha we will not sell the phone more for a while so…if you want it start killing people to get it!!

Eventhough some people are not interested… believe me, they start to be interested on it because of this stupid way of marketing.

Nintendo do the same thing that Apple do with the Wii and it works for them.

Just read this article: http://www.gadgetsthatsuck.com/index.php/2008/07/apple-iphone-overexposed-overhyped/
This site is right… the iPhone is beginning to lose its coolness.

Small town states!

Hard to understand the need to get an iPhone the first day/week. sit back and wait a few weeks… no lines and faster service.

It’s amazing the extent to which the anti-Apple brigade doesn’t quite appreciate the risks Apple took with the iPhone:

iPhone: The bet Steve Jobs didn’t decline
http://counternotions.com/2008/07/16/bet-iphone/

I’ve always been number 1 fan of all Apple…
Especially that I’ve been waiting for an iPhone since it was a rumor. I was so excited I told everybody I was gonna get one. But the one thing that got me to jump ship on the iPhone was a simple fix. I had to be dependent on an Apple rep to change my battery. That don’t fly with me at all, especially with identity theft in an upraise. I don’t know who is hire in retails these day. It will be my luck I handed over my iPhone, if I had one to a disgruntle employee. You hear this crap all over the news every day, about employee stealing company information for their own gain. It’s nothing new at all. It’s happening NOW as you read this. Big issue here as well is you can not walk in with battery problems, you must make an appointment with an Apple Genius. Which adds even more DOWN time of you cell phone use. What next I have to go to Athletic Footwear to have them tie my sneakers, cause I bought it from their store?????? Please! Find another Fool! At least with an LG Dare your guaranty ZERO down time if you ever had battery issues. Because you can change it your self. The way it is suppose to be in life… In NYC it’s THE LAW to use hand free dialing. So I use voice dialing like ten thousand times a day. I been using voice dialing for 22 years on so many CHEAP FREE phone. Hmm.. Why should anyone be looking toward the App Store to get sh*t it should already have in it? Shouldn’t the App Store be for innovative Apps? Voice Dialing isn’t innovative and shouldn’t be in the App Store. It’s like offering a phone with out a dialing capability, so now you will have to go to the App Store to download a dailing App to make Calls. Hello! It is 2008 isn’t it?

To those who think Apple purposely constrained supply, note that the iPhone 2.0 software version (5A345) delivered on the phone was seeded to developers on June 26th. If you give it 3 days before it became golden master, you get June 29th. So Apple wasn’t making any deliverable supply until June 29th. If you allow for QA, packaging, and shipping, Apple only had at most 9-11 days to create supply for launch weekend.

STOP YOUR WHINING!! to everybody complaining about the iphone, nobody’s making you get an iphone, so if you don’t want to wait, then get a piece of s*&% Instinct or better yet, a Voyager….

What a bunch of whiners.
I mean, seriously, why not do the logical thing and wait a few weeks? Ditto on upgrading to the 2.0 OS–OF COURSE the servers will be bogged down on the first weekend.

Unless your phone just broke and you need a replacement today, why not just make the world a happier place by smoothing out the demand by waiting?

And what, you think Apple can magically increase its server capacity 1000%; make 2 million phones all at once (as if they even knew what that number should be), etc. etc. so they can sell all the phones on the same day?

It’s called “rush hour” on the highway, and we all know to avoid it if at all possible. Doh!

@ Huntsville person

What’s happening, most likely, is that the Apple Store there is staying open past 9:00 in order to accommodate people who have been in line for a long time. The inventory check is run automatically at 9:00. Technically, there are phones left at that point, but they run out as they serve the remaining customers. This was my experience in Northern VA.

Sure, ideally, the inventory check would happen when the store closes. For some of these stores, however, that has been after midnight.

Posted By Rolo HzIt’s amazing how Apple fanboys will thrash Microsoft because of issues that come up with their new product introductions, but will make every excuse in the book for Apple when their first major product crashes their servers and then the store geeks won’t even let you in the store leaving us to fend for our selves with ridiculous online suggestions such as “Try to create a new user account on your computer and plug in your iPhone to a different USB port”.

Logging in to a new account is a valid solution for permissions problems or software settings and conflicts in OSX. You sound like a typical Apple basher with your “fanboy” remark. Though I fully converted my personal system to OSX from Windows, I still maintain several windows XP machines in my household. The problems we continue to have using Windows pales in comparison to this, at least you can still use your Mac.

First Nintendo, then Apple, then Apple again. Why can’t these stupid tech companies do mail order. Shouldn’t I just be able to call up AT&T and order the thing? No, they want their customers to form a line early in the morning around one of their retail outlets. Three cheers for Apple engineers but their Marketing guys and MBA should go back to business school or at least take a 20K pay cut.

Apple has really deceived the public on this one.
I was told last Friday to order via direct fulfillment and the phone would be here on Monday.
Guess what? Now the AT&T store is saying it could be up to a month before they fill my order.
Maybe it is time to look at the Instinct.

AT&T IS NOT the only 3G ‘GSM’ provider in the US, and its network IS NOT fully compatible with the 3G in the rest of the world.

The rest of the world uses 2100MHz WCDMA/UMTS while AT&T uses 850/1900MHz WCDMA/UMTS (ignore Ace Wireless of Gardena whom will tell you something different). 2100MHz is used for satellite in the USA. Meanwhile, T-Mobile got stuck with 1700MHz WCDMA/UMTS.

AT&T is lucky that it has been trying to deploy its 3G for the last 6 years now which has given chip makers enough lead time to ‘consider’ making 850/1900 a supported standard frequency such as the current iPhone.

However, 3G phones that support the world and AT&T frequencies have abounded for years including the 8525, the 3G Windows Mobile Treos, Nokia N95 and variants, 8925, and various other HTC phones.

Screw Apple. Their damn website for 2 days has shown availability in Huntsville. Guess what? Nope! LIke I should feel HONORED to even have the chance to get one.

I upgraded to 2.0 on Friday in the early afternoon with no problems … I intend to skip this generation of iPhone and get the next one since the real upgrade for my needs was a software driven one. I am curious to one day see some real figures on how the launch went (% of people who couldn’t activate in the first few hours, % in the first few days etc.) I am in retail and customers expect and demand 100% execution, which is fine, but we have to keep in mind that even an extremely high execution rate will leave a lot of people upset, and those tend to be the most vocal of them all (complete with personal attacks towards Steve Jobs and promises to never buy another Apple product … yikes).
I am still impressed at how far Apple has come after just one year in the cellular business … just look at the design of the phones coming out now, each hoping to be the iPhone killer (and looking like one) … all told, not bad for one year officially in this brutal market with seasons players.
I for one count myself as happy customer and am delighted to see the success of iPhone 3G.

I’m kind of disappointed that the media have completely ignored the plight of non-3G iPhone owners trying to upgrade to 2.0. I (along with thousands, basd on the Apple discussion groups, spent our entire weekends trying to unbrick our iPhones. It’s amazing how Apple fanboys will thrash Microsoft because of issues that come up with their new product introductions, but will make every excuse in the book for Apple when their first major product crashes their servers and then the store geeks won’t even let you in the store leaving us to fend for our selves with ridiculous online suggestions such as “Try to create a new user account on your computer and plug in your iPhone to a different USB port”. I love my iPhone and would never trade it in for anything else, but com’on Apple provide us with a software update that will go smoothly please.

Those who want an U.S. iPhone without AT&T may be out of luck: AT&T is the only 3G provider in the U.S. whose network is fully compatible with 3G in the rest of the world. The iPhone doesn’t have different hardware for different countries; it works everywhere. Not all 3G is the same–in fact, not all UMTS/HSDPA is the same (frequencies used vary). For the moment, we’re stuck with that situation.

(I believe with the slower EDGE standard, an iPhone is unofficially compatible with T-Mobile in the U.S. One possibility, then, is to get a good deal on a used EDGE iPhone.)

Funny, in NC there are Wii’s everywhere, maybe I should start shipping them to NYC… :)

I have my iPod for music, Blackberry for work. That is the way it will stay. Love the curve!

I really thought after the way the original iPhone launch went, that the reason we had an announcement in early June followed by a 4 week wait was to get enough stock on the ground to meet demand. Clearly, not the case. The longer they are impossible to get, the more we want them.

I’ve called Apple stores in my area every day, and for the most part, the empoyees have been fantastic. The one exception was one employee at a Colorado store who said “We don’t know when we will have more stock, and if we did we wouldn’t tell YOU (emphasis on you).” That was the first time I’d come across an Apple employee that loathed consumers. Maybe the five days of answering the phone and having to say “No we don’t have any iPhones” just got to her.

I think Steve Jobs just sees us more as cows to be milked.

obviously “MN” from NY you have never used the iphone. the iphone isn’t even in the same category as those free bricks they give away with activation.

Why is it that people complain about $4 gas, increasing food prices… that we have to “clamp down” blah blah… and then shell out top dollar for an overpriced phone… esp. when you can get one for free.

When is Apple’s exclusive contract with ATT up? Has there been a confirmend date? (Other than 5 yrs or Jan. 2009 as quoted by various sources)

Really want one, but not with ATT!

AT&T stores are now being instructed to quote 30 days for “direct fulfillment” orders of the iPhone which were previously being quoted as 7-10 days with shipments reported as arriving in stores today. I think it is a ploy to get customers to wait for in store availability vs ordering so that they can get out from under the order backlog. If it is true then AT&T stores will be sold out for the next 30 days since they have stated that they will fill all their direct fulfillment orders prior to stocking stores. Does this mean that they have sold the available stock in the US and are waiting for shipments from the manufacturer? I think that would mean that they sold many more than the 1m quoted since there was an estimated 2.5m units contained in those “shipping containers” previously reported.

@farm girl
If you really wanted an iPhone, you could move to a state that has AT&T or an Apple Store. :-)

@farmgirl

see if you can get one of the old models and then hack it open. Thousands of people have been doing that in other countries. Then you can use it anywhere.

Good luck.

The New Zealand teardown on July 11 also found a large chip by Skyworks (SWKS) that is not mentioned here.

The availability widget is a useless joke.

In Kansas City yesterday there were 45 people waiting in line because the “availability widget” said the store was fully stocked in all models.

Around 1pm, the manager came out and told us they had no units, but expected a shipment “soon.”

After another hour (with the Apple people passing out water), they finally came out and told everyone there was no shipment.

The line was furious, as most people had waited for several hours on the belief the phones were in stock.

The Apple manager did make arrangements to accommodate those who waited in line, but the point is that the online “availability” is not to be trusted.

I just called and was told that you can pre-order the iPhone from them.

Sales would have been alot stronger had apple & AT&T not made the purchase process so tedious and deliberately held back supply similar to the Wii.

1 million sold out of US population of 300 million is less than 1% but only because supply was so limited.

I am sure people will be willing to pay $2,000 or more on ebay or craigslist like they are doing for a Wii console with nothing included at the present time.

In NYC you can’t find a Wii anywhere. People send family members & neighbors to wait outside Target on Weekdays before the store opens to see if they can buy one of the 5 wii’s that they get in their shipment

iPhone 3G was sold out in Switzerland 10AM Friday. Most shops were empty before 8AM. It’s impossible to get one here!

When does the stock reflect the growth?

The demand for the iPhone will be incredible! The growth story for Apple in the coming decade will be followed by its upward rise to the top 50 in the Fortune 500.

Apple would have sold 2 million 3G iPhones but the Apple and Carrier stores sold out by Sunday morning. They will likely sell out for a few more weeks. Apple didn’t expect the huge web traffic from the Apps Store that is why the servers crashed. Apple needs more servers because they will sell more iPhones. Most iPhone purchases are from non-USA sales. They’ve waited a year for the iPhone.
The 3G iPhone is awesome. You can view full internet at fast speeds. Check out this blog: http://www.sports–today.blogspot.com

Availability in Vermont is ALWAYS ZERO. No iPhones sold there–no ATT.