Apple Watch is a Sellout
If you were planning to order the new Apple Watch this week or pick one up at the Apple Store on April 24, you’re going to have to wait for a while. Nearly a million Apple lovers went online bright and early Friday morning to place their pre-orders for the new smartwatch, leading Apple to declare the item sold out just six hours after it went on sale.
Apple has not revealed exact stats yet but digital commerce measurement firm Slice Intelligence has estimated that 957,000 pre-orders for the watch were placed on April 10, the first day that the device was available for online orders. While the Apple online store has images of the watch splashed across its site with the phrase “Pre-order is now available exclusively online” shoppers can look but they cannot actually place one of the watches into a shopping bag. Apple will probably announce later this week when the site will resume taking pre-orders.
Out of the million lucky early birds not all of them will be receiving their new Apple Watch models promptly on April 14. While some of the less expensive versions of the Apple Watch will be shipping in late April or early May, the waiting period for the Edition models stretches out into the summer.
That 957,000 figure does not include pre-orders for the Apple Watch Edition due to the small number of potential buyers willing to put $10,000+ on their platinum cards for a device they haven’t even seen yet. The Edition demo is likely to be making appointments for special VIP service at the select number of Apple stores that will be carrying the 18k gold watch.
So the launch of the Apple Watch can officially be declared a success but only time will tell whether a few million more customers will be willing to spend $350 or more for the first version of a device that is likely to be outdated in the near future.
