Apple bungled iPhone Duo preorders by insisting on wider launch

Apple has fumbled launches before, but the iPhone Duo preorders might be the most self-inflicted one yet. The Apple Store app did not even start taking orders until a couple of minutes after the 5 a.m. Pacific Time start.

By about 5:02, almost every configuration showed an early November delivery, more than a week after the October 23 release date. Then the estimates slid to mid-November, late November, December, and, finally, to late January.

iPhone Duo launch planning

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple knew supply would be severely constrained but launched its first foldable phone anyway, apparently eager to get the device out early in its fiscal first quarter. Apple also has not said how many units, if any, will be in stores on launch day for people who want to get in on the action without preorders.

Apple originally planned to start with just the US and China, says Gurman, but ended up shipping the iPhone Duo to more than 70 countries at once. That global rollout made things much worse, spreading a tiny stock of the initial manufacturing batches across many markets, when its two largest and most visible ones could have had a decent shot at getting a phone. It is hard to argue that this was a serious miscalculation on account of Apple's new CEO Ternus.

Ternus recently sat for an interview where he recalled how he advised the iPhone Duo development team to take it slow instead of unleashing a good-enough product. That approach led to the development of the iPhone Duo's nanotexture display material that can be swapped as a screen protector when the crease starts to get more deformed and visible with time. "You’ll know when it’s the right thing," he has said to the team, but that amount of planning apparently didn't apply to the actual iPhone Duo release.

iPhone Duo shipping wait times

Those who missed the first few minutes of iPhone Duo preorders' start are now facing a wait of over three months for a phone that expensive. The timing stings, too. Someone receiving a Duo in late January will already be about a quarter of the way to the expected iPhone Duo 2, and that is a long wait for a $2,000 device with an eventual better successor on the horizon.

Apple has history here, since its first notch-y iPhone X shipped weeks late and sold out in November 2017 because of OLED and Face ID production problems. Apple's AirPower was announced on stage and never saw the light of day due to technical challenges with its wireless charging promises. The HomePod missed its original release window, too, while the iPhone 4 brought Antennagate and a free bumper case as a fix.

Those, however, were product problems or slow burns, but a three-month wait for a new iPhone with solved manufacturing challenges is practically unprecedented, especially from a company that sold its supply chain mastery as a core strength during the reign of Tim Cook as CEO. 

According to Gurman, Apple may now expect that empty shelves for the Duo will push some shoppers toward the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, which would seem half-price next to a Duo, especially as stock is now trickling to Amazon, too. Shoppers who come in for the foldable hype may leave with a regular Pro, and that may ultimately help Q1 sales numbers and still leave a lot of pending demand for Apple's first foldable phone to go into the next year.