Apple opted to have perhaps four times as much iPhone Duo stock at retail as it did online on launch day, and despite this, most went home empty-handed.
Apple has called demand for the iPhone Duo “extraordinary” and manufacturer Foxconn has talked about using its international facilities to produce more. Granted, pre-order stock sold out instantly, although a new report suggests there’s a reason for that.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple chose to funnel as many iPhone Duo units as possible to Apple Stores instead of holding them for online pre-orders. Citing people known to be close to Apple’s logistics planning, he claims on his “Power On” podcast that up to 80% of the stock was reserved for stores.
Apple never releases numbers on how many iPhones it makes, much less how it distributes them among its retail channels. But it’s still true that a certain amount is set aside for online pre-orders and a certain amount goes to stores.
In this case, however, Apple would not only have reserved only 20% of its inventory for e-commerce, including online pickup orders. These 80% were therefore intended for walk-in buyers.
Proportions, but not numbers
Without any real numbers, however, it’s unlikely that Apple will have large numbers of iPhone Duos in stores. Apple itself said supplies would be limited, and based on all possible information, that seemed optimistic.
Apple still repelled some by announcing that quantities of iPhone Duo were going to be extremely limited in stores. We asked them to provide numbers, and we never got an answer on that.
According to Gurman, some stores had around 50, and larger flagship stores might have as many as 250.
When a store sells 50 iPhone Duos, when it previously had hundreds of iPhone Xs, or thousands of iPhone 18 Pros, that seems extremely limited to us.
Gn tech
