iPhone 4S ship times shrink to 3-5 days
updated 11:25 am EST, Tue January 17, 2012
iPhone 4S shipping delays contract three months in
Apple showed it was just now starting to catch up to iPhone 4S demand on Tuesday after the online Apple Store saw lead times contract. Having been set back by a week for nearly all of the smartphone's existence, orders for AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon models now take three to five days to ship regardless of capacity. Individual carriers make it more difficult to gauge demand, although Verizon is showing a delay only on the white 32GB iPhone.
The improvement comes three months after the mid-October debut and supports beliefs that Apple was bottlenecked by supply for all of the holidays. Official insight as to how many were actually shipped won't come until January 24, although analysts are increasingly targeting their estimates at 30 million iPhones or more.
When it released the iPhone 4S, Apple had the fastest uptake it had ever seen at four million in a weekend, helped both by the addition of Sprint as well as a broader than usual international release.
