Apple’s tenth-anniversary special, the iPhone X, sold out in just ten minutes after its pre-orders started!
To be honest, this was rather expected and not quite surprising for us. iPhone X is indeed a revolutionary phone and people were expected to go crazy even though with the price hike.
If you wanted to get your hands on an iPhone X, you had to be quick enough to pre-order it before the set launch date of 3rd November. At around 12:01 a.m P.T Friday, the preorders for the ‘X’ began, and just a few models of the iPhone X could be pre-ordered for the launch date and that too for just the first ten minutes.
After the ten-min mark, the delays rose up steadily, for example, the AT&T’s gave an expected shipping date of at least a couple of weeks after the launch date. By the time, it was half an hour, none of the models from any of the carriers in the US could ship the iPhone X prior to a 4 to 5 weeks shipping date. Be happy about it still, if you are from the US since wait time in UK and Australia Is even more; don’t expect your phone to ship until unless 5 to 6 weeks.
Last time around people were facing difficulties in pre-ordering the iPhone using the Apple website while the ones’ using the iPhone and iPad app were able to do so. The opposite thing happened this time with the Apple’s store app going offline for users for around 10 minutes or so, enough for them to miss the pre-order.
After the design change in 2014 by the release of iPhone 6, there had been no significant changes overall even till the iPhone 7. Now even the iPhone 8 boasted a similar design and shape to that of the good old 6, therefore, there was high speculation that Apple would most certainly release an iPhone with a major design change and that came with the release of iPhone X.
In a bid to remove a physical home button, instead of the rather accustomed to, Touch ID, Apple instead opted for a facial recognition feature more commonly now known as the Face ID.
Also, Apple went for an OLED Display for the ‘X’ this time, which covers the whole front of the display with the screen to body ration of almost 95 percent. But along with this, there was another major change: the price of the iPhone X skyrocket to a $1000 for the base model. The iPhone X 64GB is offered for $999, £999 or AU$1,579 and the 256GB one costs $1,149, £1,149 or AU$1,829. This is a major hike in price since the iPhone 7 base-model was last year offered for $650, making an overall bump of around $350 in price.
Even with such a high bump, the design change was the main reason why people were still going to go for iPhone X, causing such high demand. This high demand of iPhone X was further boosted by the slow sales of iPhone 8 launched earlier, since the iPhone 8 didn’t have any major design changes. Therefore, due to non-presence of dramatic changes, people weren’t simply upgrading their phones.
Much like every other time, Apple nearly always sells out its devices rather quickly as compared to other phone companies. But this time around, Apple knowing about the increased demand, had even warned its customers to get in line to the Apple Stores early, if they wanted to get their hands on an iPhone X on the launch date, since it is rather known that Apple might fall short of its supply, due to production delays.