Apple chose to have perhaps four times more iPhone Duo stock at retail than for sale online on launch day, and even so, most went home empty-handed.
Apple described demand for the iPhone Duo as being "extraordinary," and manufacturer Foxconn has talked about using its international facilities to produce more. Certainly the pre-order stock sold out instantaneously, although a new report suggests there was a reason for that.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple elected to route the greater number of iPhone Duo units to Apple Stores instead of keeping them for online pre-orders. Citing people said to be close to Apple's logistics planning, he says on his "Power On" podcast that as much as 80% of the stock was reserved for the stores.
Apple never publishes figures about how many iPhones it makes, let alone how it apportions them across its retail channels. But it is always true that a certain amount are reserved for online pre-orders, and a certain amount go to stores.
In this case, though, reportedly not only did Apple reserve just 20% of its inventory for online, that included online pickup orders. So that 80% was aimed at walk-in buyers.
Proportions, but no figures
Without any actual figures, though, it's still unlikely that Apple had very many of the iPhone Duo in stores. Apple itself said stocks would be limited, and based on all information possible, that seemed to be optimistic.
Even so, Apple pushed back some when we said that iPhone Duo quantities were going to be extremely limited in the stores. We asked them to provide numbers, and we never heard back from them on the matter.
Now according to Gurman, some stores got around 50, and the biggest flagship stores may have had up to 250.
When a store gets 50 iPhone Duos to sell, when they previously got hundreds of the iPhone X, or thousands of the iPhone 18 Pro, that sounds extremely limited to us.
