I work for a place that sells guitars, amps, and effects and can kind of understand where they're coming from.
When we put "ships in early August" for a preordered guitar pedal on our site, we did so because that's what the distributor and manufacturer told us. Early August comes, no guitar pedal. Distributor says to email customers and tell them late August. Customers were frustrated with us. Then it's September and still no word. They can't even give us an ETA. We had a lot of people cancel.
Finally last week we found out our distributor DID get a delivery in early August, but it was damaged in shipping so they sent it back to the manufacturer and demanded all new units. So we are finally getting them this week.
From a customer's point of view, it looks like we lied to them. But we were constantly asking our distributor and were just giving the information we were told.
I'm sure Apple was giving Verizon some numbers of how many phones and which dates, but maybe something happened where Apple then told Verizon they couldn't meet that demand and had to push back the dates. It's upsetting, but it's not really Verizon's fault.
