Seems like it happens every time. More like a marketing formula rather than true demand and supply. Am I wrong here?
Yes, you're wrong.
Who else sells 5 million phones in a weekend?
Nobody?
Yes, nobody.
Now they're launching in another country, and a major one at that, on the first launch weekend.
When someone else sells remotely as many phones as apple does in such a short time, we can start thinking about other possibilities in general. But Apple thus far continues to sell out of their launch supplies despite every year having a significantly greater supply available at launch, followed by 2-3 months of scarcity, despite ever growing sales numbers. If Apple is selling as many phones as they are at launch and continuing to sell a ridiculous amount of phones after launch, consistently stripping them of their supply, then there's quite obviously a lot of demand for the iPhone. That there's no major press circus to document the lines after the launch weekend should also tell you that the demand is real and the supply is what it is. And Apple's ability to supply a certain iPhone model still hasn't been matched by another smartphone maker in such a short time, as even it's stronger competitors don't have the individual sales numbers of the various flagship iPhone models in the early going of the products.
Bear in mind that everything I'm about to say is pure speculation, but one thing I find interesting about at least U.S. demand post-launch relative to the concurrent launch in China stems to a story I heard from a few Apple employees and one play out many times firsthand when visiting multiple Apple Stores in the morning in the month or two following iPhone launches. Every day, there will be a line of people there to try to buy the iPhone. Every day, at least half of the people in these lines are the same, day after day, for weeks on end. They're scalpers, they're oftentimes there with their whole families to bypass the device limit rules, and from what I was told, they send them off to China to be sold when they're able to get them. If you've got these types trying to snag up what little inventory is available for the first couple of months in the U.S. to send to China, it might make sense to take steps to bypass them by launching in a market that has a crazy demand for the product right away, thus cutting the value of iPhones attempting to be resold in China that were released in the American market. It also then opens up more of that supply trickling in to users in the intended market. They're going to sell them either way, so I assume they'd prefer to sell them directly to people in China if possible and to have happier customers in America. And maybe it'll just play out like that, in that the supply to America will be less, but it will go to customers at the same rate, and in the Chinese markets, they won't have to resort to paying scalper prices so often. I don't know, like I said, it's just speculation, and just due to the size of the market and the demand, it's not as if they need any more justification to launch in China right away. I'm more just curious to see if it changes how things go over here in the month or so following the launch.