The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max inventory situation improved this week for the Big 3 carriers. It appears that T-Mobile had a pretty big order of the iPhone 14 Pro in this cycle and this has been allowing them to have more inventory available than Verizon or AT&T. What might be hurting T-Mobile is their 24-month installment schedule versus 36 months for the other two.
The iPhone 14 Pro inventory situation appears to point to complete inventory control (meaning all but an isolated color/ memory match readily in stock) by the beginning of November. This is excellent news for the carriers heading into the Holiday season.
Tha iPhone 14 Pro Max situation is a bit more tenuous, hence the use of that slide as our opening picture. AT&T is seeing offsets – one color delayed a week with one or more colors pulled in. This is a part of the normal cycle that we have seen with the Pro Max lines in the last three years. In fact, given that this points to full inventory availability by Thanksgiving, it’s likely that Apple will be back to “ready to ship” status across all of the carriers during all of December.
We also took a look at both Xfinity (Comcast) Mobile and Spectrum (Charter) Mobile inventories. They are delayed an additional 1-3 weeks from those shown for the Big 3 in the attached PDF. In fact, for the coveted color of 2022 (Silver), Spectrum simply shows “out of stock” with no backorder expected date. This likely indicates more demand than expected, but also could indicate that the quarter could have been even better had they ordered more inventory. We will likely get an indication of overall demand with Apple’s earnings on Thursday, October 27.
More to come in next week’s report.
