Wednesday Apple Rumors: Severely Constrained iPhone 5s Launch Supply

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daily apple rumors AAPLHere are your Apple rumors and AAPL news items for today:

Tight: Inside sources at major U.S. wireless carriers tell AllThingsD that the inventory of Apple‘s (AAPL) new flagship iPhone available for its launch are far lower than expected. A source said that one carrier had a “grotesquely unavailable inventory” of the iPhone 5s. Apple unveiled the iPhone 5s and its lower-priced companion iPhone 5c at a media event last week. The company has been taking pre-orders of the colorful iPhone 5c, but is not accepting pre-orders of the iPhone 5s, except in China. That lack of pre-orders for the iPhone 5s appeared to confirm rumors that surfaced over the past several weeks indicating that Apple’s manufacturing partners were encountering difficulties producing adequate volumes of the phones due to production issues caused by the new fingerprint sensor. The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c hit store shelves on Friday. The new iPhones are being carried by all four major U.S. carriers: AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S) and T-Mobile (TMUS). Demand for the new iPhone 5s is expected to be heavy among current iPhone users. Apple faced similar inventory constraints during the launch of the iPhone 5 last year.

Weaker: A wireless carrier source says that pre-orders for Apple’s new iPhone 5c have been less than “overwhelming,” according to Reuters. The iPhone 5c features a plastic back and comes in multiple colors, including blue, white, pink, yellow and green. Its internal components are essentially the same as the current iPhone 5. Apple started taking pre-orders for the new iPhone 5c last week. The source also tells Reuters that the number of iPhone 5c’s available to all wireless carriers for the phone’s launch on Friday was much lower than anticipated.

Boost: The launch of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will increase the number of iPhones Apple sells this quarter by 28% compared to last year, Fortune notes. The prediction comes from Morgan Stanley (MS) analyst Katy Huberty who estimates that Apple will sell 34.5 million iPhones during its fiscal fourth quarter, which closes at the end of this month. Huberty’s forecast tops the 31 million iPhones that Wall Street is expecting Apple to sell during the current quarter. During the same period last year, Apple sold 26.9 million iPhones.

For more about the company, check out our previous Apple Rumors stories.


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