Image via Apple Store Online
When new products go up for order, it can be interesting (if not altogether informative) to see what’s still available day-one and what would require a bit of patience. To that end, I hit Apple’s site to check availability for iPad Air, the green hued models in the iPhone 13 line, and iPhone SE. Of the products Apple put up for pre-order on Friday, the one playing hard to get is the one that (at first glance, anyway) seems the least exciting.
Checking Sunday afternoon, shipping times for iPhone SE had slipped to the end of this month. Running a check of every color, carrier unlocked, in every storage capacity showed the phone landing in the hands of a would be buyer on 29 March for free shipping. Consumers could have it by 28 March if they were willing to pay eight-bucks for expedited shipping. That said, at least for my local Apple Store, I could have placed an order online and picked it up in store this Friday 18 March, so that may be an option for you as well.
Moving to the updated iPad Air, if you’re cool with wifi-only, ordering Sunday afternoon would have made you a day-one user. Shipping times for 64GB and 256GB models in several colors showed delivery this Friday 18 March. Add cellular though, and you might be adding time as well. For the 256GB models, wifi + cellular showed a delivery window of 29 March through 5 April. Drop the storage down to 64GB though, and you’d still be surfing this Friday. At least that was the case as of Sunday.
All of the green iPhone 13s I checked, from the mini to the Pro Max, showed availability this Friday. That said, I will confess that I’m not sure I checked them all. One gets lost after a while.
Though they were made available for pre-order last Tuesday, we may as well check Mac Studio availability as well. There is none. At least not this month. Buying “off the rack,” a base model M1 Max Mac Studio shows a delivery window between 5 April and 12 April. Make it an M1 Ultra and you may be making it May. The window for one of those with no customization opens between 26 April and 3 May. As for Apple’s Studio Display, spending more means waiting more. Buying with the standard glass yields delivery in the second week of April, roughly four-weeks from now. Add $300 for nano-texture glass, and you’re adding another month to a month-and-a-half. Apple’s site offers no hard dates for that one, saying simply “8 - 10 weeks.”