Apple and ATT claim iPhone sales records

iPhone 4 pre-order sellouts set all-time records for both Apple and AT&T, the companies said today. Apple said it had taken over 600,000 pre-orders for the phone; the number was not only the highest ever seen for an Apple pre-order but "far higher than we anticipated," it explained. The company apologized and hoped customers would visit a store once the phone was shipping.

AT&T didn't provide US-specific tallies but claimed that iPhone 4 pre-orders were about 10 times higher than it saw with iPhone 3GS pre-orders last year. It explained that its suspension of pre-orders was to simply make sure the company could fulfill the orders it already had. Pre-orders might restart if Apple can supply more stock, the carrier said.

The company also justified the repeated system failures, noting that there were over 13 million visits to AT&T's eligibility page, or three times more than its previous record.

Both records promise an extremely high sell-through rate of the iPhone 4 and could easily smash last year's launch weekend sales record, where one million iPhone 3GS models were sold in three days. Analysts have already been raising sales expectations for the June 24 intro and have suspected that Apple could sell two million phones by the following Monday.

By Electronista Staff