Apple Won’t Reveal Weekend Pre-Order Numbers

Apple is confident that its latest iterations of the iPhone, the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus will be a huge hit with customers.

In a statement to CNBC, the company said that, while it is “thrilled to begin taking pre-orders on Sept. 9,” it will not release first-weekend numbers, something it has done in years past. “As we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer pre-order that we will sell out of iPhone 7,” Apple said in the statement. “These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers. Therefore, we won’t be releasing a first-weekend number any longer. We are reiterating the financial guidance for the September quarter that we provided on July 26.”

In July, Apple said it expects fourth quarter revenue between $45.5 billion and $47.5 billion, which would be a 12 percent decline from the $51.5 billion in revenue it reported in the year-earlier fourth quarter.

On Wednesday (Sept. 7), Apple unveiled the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus with incremental changes to the devices. The headphone was the biggest change as Apple got rid of the 3.5mm headphone jack. The iPhones also have a new processor that is about 40 percent faster than the previous models. Battery life has reportedly been increased by two hours. The “home” button is now pressure-activated instead of mechanically pushed, and the camera is also somewhat upgraded with a wider color spectrum. IPhone 7 Plus buyers will get two cameras on the rear that work together to improve zooming capability. The buzzword of the day was “incremental improvement,” with a lot of allusions to the wireless future. The challenge Apple faces now is convincing the buying audience that all these improvements will add up to something innovative and amazing in a future instantiation.