I know little about manufacturing or Apple's "build on demand" processes, but I'm curious as to how many units Apple actually had built, ready to ship, before April 10?
We know that no (or almost zero) Apple stores had any, even for public display, which I would have thought would be the first priority.
I imagine that a few had been built and were sent to 3rd party partners, maybe on a some contractual obligation to supply stock - I've no idea if the "Do not sell before May" order ever existed, but it looks like it was ignored!
Given the numbers being reported, it looks less than 10,000 were actually built. I'm not sure how many Best Buy, JB Hi-Fi and other equivalents there are in the world that had stock, but < 1000 I would expect, and most of these only reported getting a handful of units.
So the question is:
Did Apple really not have confidence that the rMB would sell, and deliberately made it a 'wait and see' production?
Or have they had some production problem that meant they were way behind their predicted production on April 10, and are still playing catch-up?
My gut feeling is the latter. Given strong Mac sales, Apple's analysts should be able to make reasonable (even +/- 50%) estimates of initial sales volume, so they could have had 50-100,000 units ready to go. So even if sales were disappointing in the first few weeks, and the product was a flop (in relative terms) they would shift them easily enough over 1-2 quarters.
I guess we will never know, unless some disgruntled worker in their Chinese plant spills the beans.
We know that no (or almost zero) Apple stores had any, even for public display, which I would have thought would be the first priority.
I imagine that a few had been built and were sent to 3rd party partners, maybe on a some contractual obligation to supply stock - I've no idea if the "Do not sell before May" order ever existed, but it looks like it was ignored!
Given the numbers being reported, it looks less than 10,000 were actually built. I'm not sure how many Best Buy, JB Hi-Fi and other equivalents there are in the world that had stock, but < 1000 I would expect, and most of these only reported getting a handful of units.
So the question is:
Did Apple really not have confidence that the rMB would sell, and deliberately made it a 'wait and see' production?
Or have they had some production problem that meant they were way behind their predicted production on April 10, and are still playing catch-up?
My gut feeling is the latter. Given strong Mac sales, Apple's analysts should be able to make reasonable (even +/- 50%) estimates of initial sales volume, so they could have had 50-100,000 units ready to go. So even if sales were disappointing in the first few weeks, and the product was a flop (in relative terms) they would shift them easily enough over 1-2 quarters.
I guess we will never know, unless some disgruntled worker in their Chinese plant spills the beans.
