Long lines formed outside Apple stores today as the iPhone 4 hit shelves.
An Apple representative from a store in New York City said the store hoped to accommodate everyone who was waiting in line but didn’t know if they had enough devices in stock for customer who hadn’t pre-ordered the device.
BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk said in a blog post that the lines were long at all the Apple stores he visited and appeared to be much longer than prior years.
Apple said last week that it had received 600,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4, which has several long-awaited features, including third-party multitasking and front- and back-facing cameras.
Earlier demand for the device caused major glitches on AT&T’s website, which in turn caused bugs in the orders placed through Apple’s website. AT&T said iPhone 4 pre-orders were 10 times higher than last year’s sales of the iPhone 3G S. The device already has been shipped to AT&T customers but will not hit AT&T stores until June 29. Customers who place their orders online after the brick-and-mortar launch of the phone won’t have the devices shipped until mid-July.
Apple devotees holding out for a white model of the iPhone 4 will have to wait until the second half of July for that device after it proved “more challenging to manufacture” than the black models, Apple said.
Bookmaker.com CEO Mickey Richardson calculated the odds for the number of iPhones that will be sold today, saying there’s a 50 percent chance that more than 1 million iPhone 4 devices will be sold today. He puts the odds of between 750,000 and 999,999 devices being sold at 57.8 percent.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster expects Apple will sell 1 million iPhone 4s in its opening weekend and expects 9.5 million of the devices to sell before Apple’s quarter closes on June 30, reports the Associated Press.
