From DailyTech: Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) Apple Watch sprinted out the gate with roughly 900k units sold via preorders, but word of supply shortfall quickly spread. Particularly telling, Apple froze the preorders relatively quickly and made it clear that while the smartwatch would be able to test at select retail sites in a handful of countries, it would not be available for sale in store.
Thus the Apple Watch missed the typical "waiting in line" hype that surrounds most of the company's product launches. And in the absence of hype cynicism grew.
But finally, Apple has announced that it will be reopening ordering, both in-stores and online. The only catch is that the stores themselves don't have stocks of the Watch, so you'll have to wait an indefinite period to be delivered. That said, the fact that Apple is thawing the order process suggest confidence that its supply chain will deliver in (relatively) timely fashion.
With availabiliy reopen, there's also interesting news to report on the volume front. Slice Intelligence, a market research with a high tech focus, offered up fresh estimates of how many Apple Watches had been shipped and sold to date.
This latest update from Slice Intelligence comes after a more dreary mid-May update that declared the only roughly half (48 percent) of Apple Watch preorders had received their product, and that a third (33 percent) had not received an estimated ship date.
Nearly two months into its sales run, Slice Intelligence reports in numbers shared with Reuters that the pace is picking up slightly, with 2.79 million units sold to date.
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