With the iPhone 5s in high demand, still-constrained supply of the iPad Air and tight availability of the iPad mini with Retina display, getting your hands on one of Apple’s latest iDevices isn’t yet a simple matter of waltzing inside your nearest Apple Store and pulling a credit card out of your pocket.
A handful of web apps in existence provide iDevice availability information by repurposing Apple’s online store data. But having taken a tough stance on scrapping its web store, Apple has recently dispatched its lawyers.
One of the first ones to bite the dust was the popular Apple-Tracker.com, which got shuttered shortly after receiving a takedown notice from Apple’s legal team. Not content with going down without a fight, administrator Mordy Tikotzky has released the website code into the wild, allowing others to make web-based inventory-checker tools…
The new iDevice tracker lets you check supply of the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and the newly-relesaed iPad mini with Retina display. It’s an exact pixel-by-pixel replica of the original (now non-functional) web tool at Apple-Tracker.
Apple.com Terms of Use prohibit use of deeplinks and data scrapping:
You may not use any “deep-link”, “page-scrape”, “robot”, “spider” or other automatic device, program, algorithm or methodology, or any similar or equivalent manual process, to access, acquire, copy or monitor any portion of the Site or any Content, or in any way reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Site or any Content, to obtain or attempt to obtain any materials, documents or information through any means not purposely made available through the Site.
You should check out the new web app before it falls prey of Apple’s legal sharks.
Like before, some caveats apply.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the tool scraps data information from the online Apple Store, but only for in-store Personal Pickup availability.
As a result, you’ll definitely want to check the online Apple Store yourself in case you’re interested in walk-in purchases.
On the other hand, the tool becomes quite handy for people in the market for a Retina iPad mini because that device is only available via online orders, with shipping or personal pickup at a nearby brick-and-mortar Apple outlet.
You may also want to check out another iPhone 5s stock-checking tool. As a bonus, there’s also this one that offers a snapshot of Retina iPad mini availability for a number of Apple Stores across the US.