If you’re hoping to just walk into an Apple retail in the US, Canada or UK and simply purchase an iPhone 4S on the spot, you may be out of luck. It seems that now Apple wants you to make a reservation a day earlier before you walk into the store, which seems to suggest that Apple may be facing supply strains due to an unexpected overwhelming response to their brand new iPhone 4S.
With pre-orders hitting 1 million on the first day itself, and selling 4 million units over the weekend, this is a new record for Apple, and perhaps these figures were not predicted by Apple themselves. Perhaps in an order to control the amount of phones being sold everyday, as you can see in the photo above, customers are now required to make a reservation online through Apple’s website before they can purchase the device in a brick and mortar retail store.
Walk in customers are definitely more than welcome, although in that case Apple will not be able to guarantee that those walk in customers will be able to buy a phone on the day itself. Priority will be given to those who made reservations the day before, and excess stock that has not been reserved will then be sold to walk in customers. We think that this is a good system, especially since the last thing Apple wants is a frustrated and irate customer who queued for an hour only to find out that they ran out of stock.
So if you have plans to get yourself an iPhone 4S, you can either purchase it online or make a reservation via Apple’s website and pick it up the next day from your preferred brick and mortar Apple retail store.