For direct orders from the Apple Online Store, how different are people's actual delivery dates than the one shown on Apple's website? I'm in Malaysia and my ETA is 6/25-7/12 (ordered 5/25). Wondering when I should expect the status to change to "preparing for shipment".
The trend for North American shipments seems to be about a one week shipment window, although some in this second wave seem to have picked up much shorter ship times. I don't have enough information from those cases yet to determine why they were shorter; I need the UPS tracking info from those cases where this occurred for those people in the same window as me. That said, it usually goes to "preparing to ship" one to about three days before it actually ships. What Apple originally quoted me was a delivery window of 6/9–6/23 and in the original confirmation email, a shipping window that was basically the same size window, but two weeks earlier. The first orders were actually arrived at the beignning of their windows (5/21). THis one seems more varied in that some seem to ship pretty close to the same time but take only a few days to arrive while others take over a week. So far I haven't seen enough consistent information to determin if there is a pattern.
The case in the UK was different in that they apparently go preparing to ship when their shipmints leave China, but don't show they are shipped until they arrive at Hinckley in the UK and are shipped to the end users from there, so they spend a long time in preparing to ship and only a day or two to actually arrive after being"shipped", whereas the North American orders typically take a week after being "shipped." Or at least that's my partern.
The service type on my order is something like UPS World Express Saver or something like that. If you know how packages from China usually track when shipped through UPS arer to Malaysia, you'd have a slightly better idea of how soon it will take once it ships.
Some people are in this window got moved up. Some of us were always here. Very few have been shifted to a later window and no one I know of has missed their latest window date.. I would expect the situation might improve for later orders as the dust settles.
