So preorders for the iPhone 5c opened at 12:01am Pacific last night, which meant 3:01am here, which meant I was NOT awake for it, and by the time I rolled out of bed around 7 and checked the Apple Store app on my phone, the blue one I actually wanted (16GB, blue, don't judge me) already showed a ship date of "2-3 weeks." The white and green ones were still showing "1-2 weeks" for a while longer. So that's your first real data point on which colors people actually want, better than any survey Apple could run: blue and pink went fast, green apparently did not.
Quick recap for anyone who was off the grid Tuesday: Apple announced two new phones instead of one this time. The 5s is the "real" flagship, aluminum, comes in space gray/silver/gold, has that Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the home button, and a new co-processor thing they're calling the M7 for motion data. The 5c is the plastic one, five colors, and is being sold as the budget option even though "budget" here means $99 on a two year contract for 16GB, or $549 if you want it unlocked and off-contract. That is not what I think of when I hear "budget phone," but I guess by iPhone standards it counts.
Here's the part that actually got me typing this post instead of just preordering and moving on: the 5s doesn't have preorders at all. Zero. Apple pulled the online reservation option for it sometime yesterday and just told everyone to show up at a store on the 20th if they want one on launch day. The story going around is that its manufacturing is slower because of the Touch ID sensor, something about the laser-cut sapphire ring around the home button needing more precise assembly than a normal screen part, so they can't churn them out fast enough to promise ship dates the way they can for the 5c. Whether that's the whole reason or just the reason Apple's comfortable saying out loud, I don't know. But it does mean if you want the actual flagship phone, your plan on the 20th is to get in line at a mall at 5am like it's 2010 again, while the rest of us just click a button from bed.
I ended up going with the 5c, and not really for the color, honestly, more because I don't feel like fingerprinting my way into a phone yet. Maybe that sounds paranoid given everything going around lately about the NSA and encryption, but putting a biometric marker into a product from a company that, however much I like their hardware, I don't fully control the software stack on? I'll wait a generation and see how people who are smarter than me about security feel about it once it's actually out. Also, and this is a smaller complaint but it's mine: my AT&T upgrade eligibility date is not until October 4th, so even the "fast" 2-3 week shipping estimate is basically irrelevant to me right now, I'm just going to be waiting regardless. Preordering felt more like reserving a parking spot than actually buying something.
The pricing structure is the thing I keep turning over though. A lot of people expected a genuinely cheap iPhone this year, something aimed at prepaid markets and other countries where a $650 unlocked phone is a rounding error compared to average income. What we got instead is basically last year's internals (it's an A6 chip, same as the 5) wrapped in a color-matched polycarbonate shell, priced only about $100 less than the flagship on contract. Off-contract it's $549 versus $649 for the 5s, a hundred bucks apart. That's not "the cheap iPhone," that's "the iPhone for people who want a case that's already a color instead of clear plastic over aluminum." I don't think that's a bad product necessarily, I just think a lot of the pre-event speculation set up expectations this thing was never going to meet, and now there's this slightly awkward round of tech writers explaining why the "budget iPhone" costs more than an entire Moto G plus a case and a movie ticket.
Anyway. Order's in, shipping estimate says early October, we'll see if that holds. If you preordered too, curious what color everyone actually landed on versus what they originally wanted, drop it in the comments.