More & more over the last several years are these (tech)? companies announcing upcoming new products, then demo-ing them live, then they tell us that they can start being pre ordered in the next week or two. Is it a way to test the markets reactions to the new products, or some other reason(s).
Just my pet peeve I guess... why not just wait an extra week or two to demo the product, when its actually available.
Any thoughts or opinions out there?
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My bet is that it helps to hype the product, and also to gauge demand in different markets - if you have a ton of pre-orders from one country, but not another, you can allocate more in-store product where it's needed most.
Just like movies. Lots of publicity to drive up interest and maximize media coverage. If they just released them you'd have a day or two of reviews and people would move on. Apple gets to drag this out to 2 weeks with speculation, excited users full of anticipation, etc. I think it may also knock down people's resistance to waiting for reviews. Folks will pre-order because they can't wait. If they were able to read full reviews on the first buying day, they may wait for the review.
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I always seen it as a balance between getting ahead of the rumours and supply chain leaks before expectations become unreasonably high, and having enough time to produce and stockpile enough units to attempt to meet launch demand (almost an impossible task, but at least they try).
I've always seen this as the reason why the lead time between announcement and availability has gotten longer as Apple's products have become more popular. And why their less popular products still typically ship within 24 hours of official announcement.
I'd think not enough either... but basic economics dictates they would only tool up and get running enough production lines to satisfy the predicted long term demand, not the initial peak demand.
So an example with completely made up numbers... assume long term demand of 3 million phones a week, and peak demand of 12 million phone over the initial few launch days, they need to be producing full speed for 4 weeks to satisfy launch demand (another assumption, as typically production ramps slow and only gets to full speed after a little while).
That said, they've had a pretty hard time satisfying launch demand the last few years, but all evidence suggests that they can only keep the phone secret for a relatively short period of time once production starts ramping up(this is when the leaks start coming fast and furious) to full speed and there are literally hundreds of thousands of chinese factory workers producing iPhones... Just look at this year, practically every major detail leaked well in advance of the announcement... about the only thing they managed to keep under wraps was that the A7 processor is going 64bit... but given that that would not be readily apparent from just looking at the chip it's not surprising they were able to keep that a secret...
There's been a lot of chatter on the tech blogs about the fact that not allowing pre-orders for the 5S in particular points to low yields and severe product constraints for that product at least.
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Well the best option for learning tech blogs is to start using simple blogs and this is the reason of traffic coming into the site and it really helps and this is the reason it is called pre order thought.
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