Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Carrier Sources Say iPhone 5s Inventory on Friday Will Be “Grotesquely” Low

If you are hoping to get an iPhone 5s on Friday, be prepared to have to work for it.

Sources at multiple U.S. carriers said that the inventory of the new phone is significantly less than expected.

“We will have grotesquely unavailable inventory,” was how one carrier source put it.

A source at a second carrier also complained of extremely disappointing shipments from Apple, but said that demand for the high-end iPhone may also be slightly less than initially thought, too. Apparently it is the colors of the iPhone 5c that seem to have captured more customer’s eye.

The iPhone 5s and 5c are both slated to go on sale Friday at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Apple only took preorders for the iPhone 5c, and carriers said supply there appears to be significantly better.

An Apple representative declined to comment.

Boy Genius Report said earlier Tuesday that supply for the iPhone 5s was expected to be “severely constrained.”

And, of course, those colors are creating added headaches for retailers and carriers that are trying to predict which colors will be most popular in which locations.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik