Right now, all the iPhone X models are showing a 5-6 wait for delivery on Apple’s online store. If you were determined to get your hands on a phone in November but didn’t stay up until 3AM this morning, that could be a problem.
But according to industry analyst Amit Daryanani from RBC Capital Markets, that number could just be a conservative estimate from Apple, and devices could ship out much sooner.
In a note on iPhone X pre-orders, Daryanani explains how the 5-6 week shipping estimate is suspiciously consistent across the world:
We checked lead times for US, UK, Germany, UK, China, Japan and UAE, and interestingly the 5-6 week lead time is consistent across carriers, colors, memory size and geographies. This could mean that the 5-6 weeks number is conservative and users would likely receive it before that timeline.
Daryanani is right that the lead time is suspiciously consistent. Normally, we see more variation in estimated delivery times between different colors, models, carriers, and storage sizes; the higher-capacity phones, for example, are more expensive, so are often in less demand than the cheapest entry-level models. That’s not the case this time around, and given the rumored issues with Apple’s supply chain, it could simply be the case that Apple is providing a worst-case estimate to customers, but it might beat that.
If that’s the case, then the first users to pre-order with an expected wait time of 5-6 weeks could be seeing their devices much sooner. If you order right now, you’re much more likely to be seeing your phone in December.
Overall, RBC is bullish on the iPhone X pre-sale numbers; wait times for the phone are higher than they’ve been for devices in the past, which implies that there’s no shortage of demand, even if the phone is far more expensive than anything Apple’s sold before.
