Maybe Apple has made sufficient iPhone 16e models, since it isn’t selling out as normal
Now some hours after preorders for the iPhone 16e opened, every configuration remains in stock to deliver on February 28.
Back in September 2024, the iPhone 16 Pro Max was selling so well that within 18 minutes certain configurations were sold out. Apple will always make more, but the delivery date had immediately slipped back a week.
That’s common with Apple launches, so common that it’s practically the norm for the MacBook Pro as well as the iPhone. It even happened with the costly Apple Vision Pro.
It hasn’t happened with the iPhone 16e.
There are six possible configurations of the iPhone 16e, with two colors and three different storage options. After 60 and then 90 minutes since preorders opened, every configuration remains available for delivery on February 28, 2025.
What Apple has never and surely now will never reveal is how many of a device it has made. It is fully possible that the iPhone 16e is a massive success and Apple was just brilliant at estimating how many to stock.
That would produce the result we’re seeing, the ability to get any model without delay. And especially under Tim Cook, Apple has long been totally on top of its whole supply and production chain.
Yet despite the kind of iron grip on its manufacturing that other firms would hope for, Apple still routinely hits this issue of delivery dates having to slip back weeks or even months.
It could just be good marketing. Apple itself has never exactly crowed about selling out of its iPhones, but a reason for the usual preorder rush is because buyers know to get in early.
Except this time.
So maybe Apple judged its manufacturing better than ever. And maybe it decided against using scarcity as a marketing tool.
Or maybe the iPhone 16e is not selling as well as expected. Just as appears to have happened with the 2024 OLED iPad Pro.
