Apple had a very big weekend, selling 9 million shiny metallic and glossy plastic next-generation iPhones and cleaning out plenty of store shelves. If you decided to spend last Friday doing something other than camping out in front of a store, you probably also spent the weekend empty handed. At this point, if you’re too anxious to get a new gadget in your hand to wait for one to ship, your best local bet could be an Apple Store.
Perhaps in a move to save their employees from fielding desperate phone calls inquiring about availability, Apple added an online availability indicator to their webstore, and hid it just a bit out of the way under “Personal Pickup.” Fill in your desired configuration and click the link to search for options in nearby stores.
As of midnight on Monday, there appeared to be a rainbow of colors and configurations available for the 5C; but the 5S seems to be a much rarer commodity. When I checked the various permutations, the University Village Apple Store still had a handful of models in “Space Gray” for AT&T (Alderwood had only the 32GB). For Verizon, only 64 GB gray phones were available at the University Village, Alderwood, and Southcenter stores; Alderwood also had a 64 GB configured for Sprint. Silver and Gold look even more constrained, with the lone Seattle-area option being a 32 GB silver Verizon iPhone in Southcenter.
Availability seems to update during the day — I lucked out and found my dream phone via the online store’s and enlisted the personal pickup option to breeze past the crowd at Southcenter to complete the adoption process on Monday evening — so eager shoppers should keep an eye on the site to see if any ideal candidates appear. Or, save yourself some anxiety and gain the patience to wait for your order to arrive in the mail, particularly if you’re heart’s set on the elusive golden phone.
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