I'd love to see numbers to compare this to the sale of previous iPhones. My gut instinct says this is a supply-side issue more than a popularity issue. Could google be keeping supply low to keep demand up? Or was this such a popular product (people reporting that this bringing the google store to its knees) that it sold out within minutes and google was just ill prepared for the popularity?
The iPhone 5 sold five million in the first three days. The phone was announced Sep-12, preorders opened Sep-14, sales opened Sep-21. If you look at the estimated BOM+manufacturing cost ($207) that means Apple probably had a billion dollars worth of iPhones sitting in their distribution network before they even started selling them.
Does Google have five million of these phones sitting in a warehouse? I doubt it, they probably manufactured based on historical Nexus sales figures, and I'd guess that the fact that this is sold out just means it is selling better than previous Nexus phones.
EDIT: I can't find a good source but my best estimate for the sales of the Galaxy Nexus (i.e. Nexus 3) is 100,000 per month based on sales of $250M over 6 months at $400 ea. [1]
The Nexus phones typically haven't been all that popular, so it wouldn't surprise me if supply was low. That would have been more because of expected low demand than marketing. Perhaps they were aiming to sell out on low demand, and got more than they bargained for.
The fact that Google Play slowed to a crawl once orders opened in every single country tells me that they must have had a good amount of sales right? Even if they did have a small stock of devices this tells me that there is a high demand for the Nexus 4.
My gut feel is the opposite. This is a ridiculous phone, for a ridiculous price. I personally wanted it and couldn't get it Today yet, and I know of at least 5 other people (outside the US) who've been pinging me to see if it's going to be available anytime soon. Pretty sure it's a demand-issue this time.
Given it's 50 minutes, the numbers don't have to be incredibl good to make a really impressive-sounding rate.
Let's say they had a quarter million units for sale for their first run (given their Nex7 sales, totally reasonable). That means they're selling ~80 phones a second.
Now did Apple sell more? Sure. Does that mean these numbers are bad, even in a relative sense given the obscurity of the Nexus brand, the troubles during launch and the location of sale?
