Following its September debut and severely constrained supply, Apple’s iPhone 5s has finally achieved full availability across the company’s retail outlets in the United States. According to a survey by one analyst, the flagship Apple smartphone is now in stock for all colors and capacities and across all major U.S. carriers in company-owned U.S. retail Apple Stores.
Although the U.S. Online Apple Store still shows ship times of five to seven business days, you should now have no issues waltzing inside your nearest Apple Store and picking up an iPhone 5s. At any rate, this is a good sign which indicates Apple and its suppliers have finally caught up with demand ahead of the all-important Christmas shopping frenzy…
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster (via AppleInsider) has polled 60 U.S. Apple Stores and found that device availability has improved “dramatically” from just two weeks ago, with all models being 100 percent in stock at all locations polled, as of last week.
Munster wrote in a note to clients:
We believe Apple has caught up to demand, which we had expected ahead of the core holiday period. In reflecting on the supply for the 5S product launch overall, we believe that net-net Apple has done a better job in supplying stores with phones proportional to demand.
In a similar survey two weeks ago, Munster found that only 24 percent of the stores had all iPhone models in stock. At the start of October, the iPhone 5s was available in just eight percent of the U.S. Apple Stores, remarked the analyst.
“That availability even includes unlocked iPhone 5s models, which can be purchased at full unsubsidized pricing starting at $649 for the 16-gigabyte entry-level capacity,” the publication added.
Elsewhere around the world, Apple’s ship times for the iPhone 5s have recently improved to one to three business days for online orders. Piper Jaffray is calling for a sixteen percent year-over-year jump in iPhone sales this month and has reckoned March 2014 quarterly iPhone sales to grow twelve percent.
If a report by The Wall Street Journal this morning is anything to go by, the world’s largest wireless carrier by subscribers, China Mobile, will be taking pre-orders for the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c starting this Thursday, ahead of the December 18 launch of its fourth-generation network.
What’s the story with iPhone 5s availability at your local Apple Store?
Do they have them in stock?
If your Apple Store is one of the smaller ones, keep in mind that these locations will not hit a 100 percent availability for at least a few more days as Apple prioritizes flagship outlets.