well if apple knew in advance they were going to have supply issues why not just tell people that in very clear terms from the beginning and postpone the release date into 2013 rather than allow people to order until they A) got the issue fixed B) had enough supply to at least cover their average stock
They did EXACTLY what you wanted them to do. They told everyone the iMacs would be in short supply for the whole quarter. They told us there would be a significant delay between the announcement and first units shipping to customers. When they started taking orders, they predicted extended waits on most orders, and they have shipped the vast majority of orders within the promised times.
If they had just started building iMacs without shipping them until there were "enough", NOBODY would have gotten them by now. Apple would have gotten NO iMac revenue, and would have incurred huge costs storing the unsold inventory. It makes no sense to pay to store perfectly good products that are ready to put in the hands of paying customers.
Apple knew this iMac design would have some initial manufacturing challenges, and they knew that some components would be in short supply for quite a while. No matter when you start manufacturing in volume, you only get good at it by doing it for a while. Delaying the startup by a few weeks or months doesn't help. That's the nature of manufacturing bleeding-edge products in large volume. They knew all this would happen, AND THEY TOLD US.
And make no mistake, the screens on the new iMacs are bleeding edge. Gluing a huge flat glass to an LCD, with no flaws, is hard. You get one chance. A bubble, a bit of lint, too much or too little adhesive, uneven adhesive, and you can probably throw the whole thing in the trash. And in addition to the gluing, the glass has a pretty high quality edge-to-edge antireflective coating. Once that coating is applied, the glass has to be handled carefully or the coating is damaged. It all sounds simple until you realize Apple needs to do it hundreds of thousands of times, and it has to be done fast or it costs too much.
I think it's one thing to try to be cutting edge, but honestly i'd wait for the computer to be out for a while if i knew there were these kinds of problems. I think fiasco isn't so incorrect of a term when the supply on hand and production issues are coupled with customer service reps that are not given any more information that the end users order screen.
I don't think "problems" characterizes the iMac supply chain. There's no significant quality problem that we've heard of. The production yield is low so they can't keep up with demand, but they knew that would happen.
