With 24 hours now passing since the iPad Air was launched yesterday, it seems that despite original reports that stock would be in surplus, the iPad Air shipping estimates for the 16GB and 128GB models have slipped to 5-10 days in several countries.
In the US, ship dates for nearly all other models of the tablet have gone from November 4 to November 6, with the T-Mobile variant of the Space Gray 128GB iPad Air showing it ships in 5-10 days.
iPad Air Stock
The lack of stock doesn’t seem to be a consistent theme across all models, so it seems that rather than a general lack of iPad Air stock, it seems to be more of a case of certain models being more popular than others, and the shipping times are just reflecting this. There still seems to be plenty of stock of the lower end models such as the 16GB and 32GB WiFi models, whereas the higher end 64GB and 128GB models are getting harder to find.
Before the iPad Air launched, we heard that the Apple Store and other retailers received between 500-1000 devices for launch day, and we even saw very small queues on launch day for the iPad Air. However, the stock which is assigned to the Online Store is different to the Retail Store, so it could be that the ratio was just skewed to favour the Retail Stores, as we saw with the iPhone 5S launch in order to encourage retail sales.
However, we’ll still have a short wait until we know exactly how the iPad Air did on launch weekend and see exactly how the new iPad has faired in demand.
Let us know if you’ve managed to pick up and iPad Air, and if you ordered it online or ventured to the Retail Store to pick up your new gadget.