LOS ANGELES — More than 1 million people ordered the
iPhone 4S in the first 24 hours the smartphone was on sale, Apple Inc.
announced Monday.
Such solid numbers — about as
good a start as for any new gadget — might alleviate some investor and
pundit fears that the iPhone 4S might not be different enough from the
iPhone 4 to do well in the marketplace.
The
impressive first-day preorders are a bit of good news for Apple when the
company could use some, in the wake of the death last week of Chairman
Steve Jobs.
Apple’s iPhone 4, which looks the same
as the 4S on the outside but has less sophisticated hardware on the
inside, is Apple’s best-selling iPhone overall so far. The iPhone 4 has
sold more than the first three generation of iPhones combined, Apple has
said. It also held a single-day preorder record of 600,000 units, which
was surpassed by the iPhone 4S.
“We are blown
away with the incredible customer response to iPhone 4S,” Philip
Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing,
said in a statement. “The first day preorders for iPhone 4S have been
the most for any new product that Apple has ever launched, and we are
thrilled that customers love iPhone 4S as much as we do.”
The
iPhone 4S is set to arrive in stores around Oct. 14, which should be
about the same day that those who have pre-ordered the device will see
their handsets arrive.
The iPhone 4S sales likely
got a big boost from the fact that the new phone is available to more
U.S. consumers than any previous iPhone version, with Sprint joining
AT&T and Verizon in selling the gadget. The iPhone 4S also keeps the
pricing structure of previous iPhones at 16 gigabytes of storage for
$199 and 32 gigabytes for $299, on a 2-year contract. Apple is also
releasing a 64-gigabyte iPhone for the first time, which sells for $399.
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