Everyone that needed a mac pro has made its order within the first week. So yeah, that's a lot of people to process and the mac pro facility won't have the same production capacity of let's say an iPhone factory.
It is not so much that "Needed" were ordering as much as a pent up demand was almost certainly going to be higher than supply. Apple did several things to drive up demand.
A. they stopped selling the old Mac Pro worldwide over a month before.
B. They stopped selling the old Mac Pro almost 11 months before in the EU markets.
C. They invoked the Osborne Effect over 18 months ago. Again pinning some folks upgrade plans in place as they deffer to wait on the next generation.
Apple generally doesn't hit initial iPhone demand bubbles either. So it isn't really an iPhone sized factor since the iPhone factory can't do it either. The issue is sizing the factory resources for most of the year not solely for an initial demand bubble.
And it's not needed anyway because for the rest of the year it'll only produce on (wild guess) 15% of its capacity.
Probably no where near that low. Most customers have production upgrade windows that have many other factors than just initial Apple availability. If the Mac Pro is successful the vast majority of the units will be sold later in the year. The bleeding edge gadget fringe aren't the foundation of the market.
That's why delivery estimates went skyhigh within hours. But for the same reason, they will drop as fast by mid-February or even by the end of January.
If Apple hasn't really started delivering in some countries those locations aren't going to catch up quickly by end of this month. BTO orders will likely lag a bit behind standard configs past March.
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Looks to me a rather weird way to sell anything, so I wondered why and when that sort of stupid thing will stop. Any idea?
Generally Apple makes what people order. They keep some of the lost inventories in the industry.
That means for initial demand bubbles they are generally behind, but over the course of a year they are generally not.
It isn't stupid at all since they are never caught with gobs of product they need to unload at a firesale or write down. [ Blackberry largely shot themselves in the head with excess inventory in 2013. Badly run automobiles companies typically chronically suffer from this. ]
As much as there is moaning and groaning from one subset of customers and another set of "got it first" and speculative bubble players like it. For the folks getting work done with their current machines... it makes for possibly interesting sideshow circus entertainment.
The "order today" dates are not still sliding so Apple is catching up. It is going to take several weeks but they are getting there.
