by Jason Snell

Fun! With! Preorders!

It was iPhone Duo preorder day, if you didn’t know. If you weren’t up at 5 a.m. Pacific like I was. Like so many of us were.

Stephen Hackett (who is traveling today) had some bad luck:

By the time the website came up over six minutes later — where you can search for other Apple Stores — my ship date had already slipped to the end of November or early December.

It seems that my work on Widgetsmith and our other apps will be constrained to the simulator a little longer. It is also nice to have the new thing when it’s new, so I can write and talk about it when it’s new.

I guess the upside is that, now that shipping dates have slipped into 2027, the iPhone Duo will be new for a long time.

Clearly Apple is struggling with Duo supply, but there’s also obviously a lot of Duo demand and curiosity out there. Put them together and you get a device that’s sold out into next year already. The Duo is not going to be the best-selling iPhone of this cycle—not even close—but I still think it will be the best-selling folding phone ever, and by a lot.

For the record: I got all the way to the final screen with Apple telling me my 256GB Night Sky order would be available next Friday. But then it slipped to Nov 9 – Nov 16.

At least it’s not January.