Want the iPhone 5? You're going to have to wait a while

Inventory for the iPhone 5 sold out in one hour, wait time now up to two weeks

We all knew the iPhone 5 was going to be huge, right? I mean, whenever a new iPhone comes out its always a big deal, with people standing on line for days and all that jazz. But could the iPhone 5 be the biggest one yet? After what happened last night, it certainly looks that way.

The initial inventory of the latest iPhone was sold out by in just one hour. Yes, you read that correctly.

After it officially went on pre-sale at 12 o’clock midnight Pacific Time last night, the stock of the iPhone 5 was gone by 1 am. While Apple’s website was originally notifying customers that the phone would be shipped by September 21st, the wait time for the new phone has now been bumped up to two weeks.

The demand for the phone was so high that the websites for Apple, AT&T and Sprint all went down due to high traffic, though all sites seem to be back in working order now.

Of course, this is not the first time Apple has sold out of a new iPhone in its first day of pre-order. Last year, it took 22 hours for the iPhone 4S to sell out, and it only took 20 hours for the iPhone 4 to sell out of its pre-order stock in June 2010. Selling out in one hour, though? I’m pretty sure that that is unprecedented.

Not that there weren’t indications of how huge the phone was going to be.

SellCell.com, a place for consumers to trade in their old smartphones, reported on Thursday that trade-ins for iPhones were up 800% in August, compared to the same time last year.

On top of that, trade-ins of the iPhone 4S were up nearly 450 percent over trade-ins of the iPhone 4 during the month preceding the iPhone 4S announcement in September 2011, the website said.

A year ago, Opinionaided, the instant mobile Q&A app, surveyed over 1,000 of its users who are existing iPhone owners to find out if they plan to upgrade to the iPhone 5.  The results: a shocking 49% said yes.  

A more recent survey from Changewave in July found that nearly a third of all respondents said they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to purchase an iPhone 5 when it becomes available.

So yeah, this thing was always going to be huge.

If I had to guess, part of the reason that this iPhone is so popular already may have to do with the fact that it is the first redesign of the popular smartphone since 2010’s release of the iPhone 4.

It was widely speculated that the iPhone 5 would be released last year, but the company instead released the iPhone 4S, which was essentially just a retooled version of the iPhone 4.

This iPhone, on the other hand, is completely redesigned and comes with a bunch of new features.

It is the company’s first LTE phone, which means it will be compatible with carriers’ high-speed LTE networks. In addition, its A6 processor is twice as fast as that of the 4S and it’s 22% smaller. The new phone also comes with “ultrafast” wireless, and it has a new, longer lasting battery.

As for the design of the phone, the newest model will have three microphones instead of just one, an improved camera, and a larger screen. It will also be thinner and lighter than all previous versions.

Apple was not available to comment on this story.

(Image source: www.flickr.com)