If I was a gambler, I would take odds on May 15th.
Agreed.
Also, Mother's Day is on the 13th in North America, and Apple's promoting that in their e-mail announcements right now. I'm guessing that they won't bring out new hardware in the middle of that promotion.
Just checked imac shipping CTO again, seems that it is indeed slipping. 2-4 days still. Wonder if it will hit 3-5 later next week
What i also compared was mbp custom shippping times. There remained 1-3 days on anything custom.
This tells me 4 things-
1. Imac times are slipping for real, and stock is dwindling a little
2- imac wil likely come first
3- wwdc seems logical more for a a popular handheld notebook to show vs large imac. + core i3 isnt ready til june.
4- this keeps my hopes up enough to leave my mid may next two week guess alive
The same thing happened 2-3 weeks ago and after a few days everything went back to normal. So don't get your hopes up, yet ...
Excuse my ignorance but, CTO=? and BTO=?
Keep in mind, Apple does not give insider knowledge to 3rd party resellers. While the results on that front we have seen may be due to Apple restricting supply, it could just as much have to do with the fact these resellers are smart enough to know that an iMac refresh is overdue and thus are reluctant to buy more stock in large quantities.
And again, I point to the article nearly a month ago stating MBP availability was constrained (iMac availability seems to be better than that if we haven't had an article about it), and nothing came out of that. While this thread is interesting, people shouldn't be getting their hopes up based off of its findings.
In the UK there are regularly no iMacs in the refurbished section. Also I think the shipping has only slipped due to the bank holiday on Monday.
Small update: Norwegian reseller Komplett.no (one of the biggest) is now sold out. None of the iMacs are in stock, "unconfirmed" re-stock on the 7th and 18th of May for a couple of them, the rest appear to be ordered by request only.
Only thing I think is weird is the "unconfirmed" part. They should know when the machines will be delivered to them?