Apple prepared 2 million Verizon iPhone 4 for preorders, retail [u]
Apple prepared 2 million CDMA iPhone 4 units to deliver to Verizon Wireless and its own retail stores through January, manufacturer reports indicate, suggesting that this year's preorders and launch of iPhone 4 on Verizon …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's Verizon push has moved fast since the January 11 Verizon–Apple partnership announcement: pre-orders opened at 3am ET on February 3rd with an AT&T trade-in offer attached (per MacRumors' preview), and by the same day Fortune estimated roughly 100,000 units had pre-sold before Verizon halted new orders, while Engadget reported a first-day preorder record set in about two hours.
Today's report that Apple prepared some 2 million CDMA iPhone 4 units through January — a figure from manufacturer checks and still unconfirmed by Apple or Verizon — frames that demand against supply, and follows Apple's October 2010 decision to ship the phone on 3G only rather than wait for Verizon's LTE buildout.
First-order effects
- Demand is outrunning stock on day one: Verizon stopped taking preorders after Fortune's ~100,000-unit estimate, so Apple's 2-million-unit channel fill decides how much of February demand converts into sales versus waiting lists.
- The CDMA manufacturing ramp puts Apple's supply chain on a second parallel iPhone 4 line alongside GSM, with units split between Verizon Wireless inventory and Apple's own retail stores.
Second-order effects
- AT&T now faces its first structured defection path: the preorder program bundled AT&T iPhone trade-ins, giving existing subscribers a priced exit ahead of contract end rather than after it.
- Component suppliers gain a second large CDMA customer for iPhone parts, and Verizon gains a device whose scarcity lets it market availability itself as the story.
Third-order effects
- If the multi-carrier pattern holds past this launch, the US iPhone stops being an AT&T-exclusive asset and becomes a competitive lever carriers bid for — shifting bargaining power over subsidies and terms toward Apple.
The trend: The iPhone is transitioning from a single-carrier exclusive in the US to a multi-carrier product, with each carrier launch turning handset supply allocation into a headline event.