AT&T Presses Pause on iPhone Presales

By  |  Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 9:46 am

Despite yesterday’s iPhone preordering meltdown, a heck of a lot of people reserved phoness. AT&T statement:

iPhone 4 pre-order sales yesterday were 10-times higher than the first day of pre-ordering for the iPhone 3G S last year. Consumers are clearly excited about iPhone 4, AT&T’s more affordable data plans and our early upgrade pricing.

Given this unprecedented demand and our current expectations for our iPhone 4 inventory levels when the device is available June 24, we’re suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders we’ve already received.

The availability of additional inventory will determine if we can resume taking pre-orders.

In addition to unprecedented pre-order sales, yesterday there were more than 13 million visits to AT&T’s website where customers can check to see if they are eligible to upgrade to a new phone; that number is about 3-times higher than the previous record for eligibility upgrade checks in one day.

We are working hard to bring iPhone 4 to as many of our customers as soon as possible.

Ten times as many preorders as for the 3GS? Amazing. I’m still not a believer in “AT&T is locking people in to deny them the option of a Verizon iPhone that will be announced any day now” conspiracy theories, but that’s a lot of folks who are planning to be on AT&T through 2012…

 
3 Comments


Read more: , , , ,

3 Comments For This Post

  1. Bouke Timbermont Says:
    June 16th, 2010 at 10:56 am

    “Consumers are clearly excited about iPhone 4, AT&T’s more affordable data plans and our early upgrade pricing.”

    Harhar, no At&T: Just no: people don’t want your crappy dataplans, they want the iPhone4. The only reason ANYONE is getting your new plans, is because somehow you tricked Apple into an exclusive deal.
    The proof? The demand is just as high across the borders, and the highest demand is on simlock-, commitment-free model, like the ones in France and the UK 🙂

  2. Hamranhansenhansen Says:
    June 16th, 2010 at 6:09 pm

    > is because somehow you tricked Apple into an exclusive deal.

    No, no trick. For every iPhone that Apple sells on AT&T, they sell 2 more worldwide. No US carrier other than AT&T could offer that, because the others all use nonstandard proprietary networks that are incompatible with all other carriers. It’s more correct to say Apple tricked AT&T into paying them to do it this way, because any other way has severe downsides. Apple would have had to give up all worldwide sales, or else build, deploy, and support multiple incompatible iPhones, which would have been very hard since it’s Apple that updates iOS software, not the carriers.

    So Apple really did things exactly as they wanted to for the past 2 years (iPhone has only been running on 3G for 2 years) and they got AT&T to pay them for that as if Apple was doing AT&T a favor.

    Now, T-Mobile in the US has moved to standard 3.5G, which means it’s technically possible for them to run iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, and Verizon is moving to standard 4G, which means it’s technically possible for them to run iPhone 4G. So the problem is working itself out just like the Flash/HTML5 issue is working itself out as websites standardize on HTML5 in order to work on iPhone/iPad and other mobiles.

    > AT&T is locking people in to deny them the option of
    > a Verizon iPhone that will be announced any day now

    Not any day now. But certainly in 2011 because Verizon’s 4G network will be in 30 cities by end of 2010, and it’s a GSM standard LTE network ready to run iPhone 4G.

  3. Bouke Timbermont Says:
    June 17th, 2010 at 2:34 am

    “Apple would have had to give up all worldwide sales, or else build, deploy, and support multiple incompatible iPhones, which would have been very hard since it’s Apple that updates iOS software, not the carriers.”

    You seem a bit brainwashed 😉 Ever considered Apple would have done at least just as great by releasing, promoting and selling the iPhone on their own without any provider support? That’s how it works in a lot of European countries (in Belgium exclusive deals didn’t even exist before the iPhone!), and just as you mentioned that forces the providers to use compatible networks.

    But instead AT&T threw a huge bag of cash at Apple offering them even a share of the contract-revenue (which is ridiculous: apple is not providing any service related to the phone-contracts). I even dare say the iPhone would have been an even bigger success and would have cured the rotten telco-market in the US: exclusive deals and proprietary networking technologies would dissappear and cheap, unlocked phones would become available at long last to Us customers.

    Instead people are now paying for a way to expensive contract only because they want a phone.