AT&T, the No. 2 US mobile service provider, said it set a sales record with Apple’s iPhone 5 over the weekend, making it the fastest-selling iPhone the company has ever offered.
AT&T did not disclose how many iPhones it sold, but said the iPhone 5 was still available for preorder and would go on sale from Sept. 21 at AT&T retail stores.
It is not unusual for Apple products to sell out the first day. Orders for the previous iPhone 4S, the last product the company introduced before the death of co-founder Steve Jobs, surpassed 1 million in the first 24 hours, beating Apple’s previous one-day record of 600,000 sales for the iPhone 4.
Apple’s US store, at www.apple.com, on Monday morning showed pre-orders for the iPhone 5 would take 2-3 weeks to ship.
The phone’s other carriers, Verizon Communications Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp, also showed similar delays in shipping the phone.
The company began taking orders for the iPhone 5 at midnight Pacific Time (0700 GMT) on Sept. 14, but shipping dates for the slimmer and faster smartphone slipped by a week within an hour of the start of pre-orders.
Apple had previously said it would start shipping the iPhone by Sept. 21 in the United States, UK, France, Germany and a few other countries and reach 100 by the end of the year.
Analysts have predicted that more than 30 million iPhones, including older models, will be sold by the end of September. iPhone sales account for more than half the company’s revenue.
Shares of Apple were up less than 1 percent at $694.88 in premarket trading on Monday. They closed at $691.28 on the Nasdaq on Friday. - Reuters
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