It’s over 24 hours since the iPhone 6S became available for pre-ordering or reservation at your local Apple Store come the 25th February, and it’s safe to say Apple have way more of these things than they did the iPhone 6 last fall, as you can still make a reservation for a few models and pick it up on launch day – at any UK Apple store.
Last year, I threw together a little availability chart for UK availability to give an at-a-glace view into the way these things work. It worked okay, but it polled Apple’s reservation endpoints “live” (with a 60 second cache) and didn’t really allow me to build any trends out of it.
This year, for the Apple Watch launch, I threw a database onto the backend, and started storing the responses so I could process how quickly models sold out when the reservation APIs went live, and much more importantly, make some pretty graphs. Obviously, Ahrendts ruined that plan, but I was ready for this launch.
Onto the graphs…
You can click and drag to select an area of a graph to zoom in.
It turns out, trying to display 24 series on a line graph doesn’t work well. Mostly because it’s hard to find 24 colours that are different enough for you to tell the difference.
Things get more interesting when you start comparing different colours… Rose Gold sold out significantly quicker than the other colours. Gold was second, followed by Space Grey and Silver which are pretty similar. Of course, this doesn’t tell us anything about how much stock Apple had of each model, so there isn’t much you can actually take from this data other than how hard each one is likely to be to pick up on launch day.
As you might expect, the 64GB version appears to be the most popular, with 128GB second and the 16GB version last. (Maybe this will be the last year we see the 16GB… /r/apple would be happy at least)
Finally, the biggest surprise to me: The iPhone 6S Plus models sold out much quicker than their smaller counterpart. While Apple likely had less of them in the first place, it’s still surprising to me that so many people want such a huge phone.
I had a go at seeing what the US reservation data looks like, but if you think 24 SKUs in the UK is a bit of a nightmare, take a look at what happens when you’ve got 96…
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