4 ms·
This is certainly true, but I suppose it's possible that they were making last minute changes to the hardware 6 months ago (or whenever was the deadline to get
by aetherson 9y ago
This is certainly true, but I suppose it's possible that they were making last minute changes to the hardware 6 months ago (or whenever was the deadline to get it locked), and as a result don't have very many review units until this week.
That said, I don't think that the numbers here are all that plausible. Maybe if they only gave out 50 or 100 review phones, we might say they were supply-constrained, but surely they can't be so supply-constrained that they could only give out a dozen.
- slg 9y agoThis was basically my thinking behind saying it was an unlikely scenario. "Last minute" doesn't mean they were literally deciding the hardware days before shipping the units out. It meant they were making changes right up to their deadline limiting supply and/or quality of review units. This applies the same to software although the "last minute" there is obviously later than it would be for hardware. It is possible the software was not tuned as finely as Apple likes as early as Apple wanted hence why the review units went to reviewers who likely wouldn't be as technical as some of the more traditional tech press.
- jen729w 9y agoThis hardware has been in manufacture at the rate of, let’s say, a million a day, for months. (A decent enough Fermi estimate for the purposes of this discussion.) They can ‘spare’ 10,000 review units. This was a conscious decision not driven by hardware demand.
- aetherson 9y agoThat's a huge overestimate. Manufacture of the iPhone X might reach 200k per day, more likely 100k, quite possibly as low as 20k per day if some of the more pessimistic reports about undersupply are true, and have not been at that level for months in advance. Certainly nothing like 1M per day.