Apple pulls Personal Pickup for new iPhones

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Yesterday, iDB told you that Apple extended its Personal Pickup service to include the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c and explained that shoppers can avoid crowds by ordering their handset online with same day in-store delivery. It would now appear that the company may have prematurely enhanced the service.

On Tuesday, the in-store pickup option disappeared from the online Apple Store for both new iPhone models. We’ve received more than a dozen tips and have since confirmed that Apple in fact did inexplicably pull Personal Pickup for both new handsets…

As you can see on a pair of screenies included in this post, Apple says in-store pickup is no longer available for new iPhones. “Not Eligible. In store purchase only,” the notice reads. Likewise, Personal Pickup also wasn’t available for the iPhone 4s at post time.

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New iPhones are in high demand, but as the plastic model available for shipping within 24 hours there’s no reason to pull the in-store pickup option for the iPhone 5c, especially as demand is unlikely to have changed significantly between yesterday and today.

Either someone yesterday flipped the switch on iPhone 5s/5c Personal Pickup prematurely or Apple wants us to waltz inside its shiny retail stores to buy our brand spankin new phone. Tim Cook apparently told troops he wasn’t satisfied with the fact that Apple Stores sell only one-fifth of all iPhones.

The Apple boss, the story goes, wants to up that ratio to north of forty percent.

By the way, visiting the US online Apple Store and putting an iPhone 5c in basket gave us a same-day shipping estimate, unlike new iPhone 5s models that are now vaguely estimated to ship “in October” for both subsidized and non-subsidized variants.