If you’re wondering whether it might be a good time to head to the nearest Apple Store to join the queue for a new iPhone, the folks at Top Muffin offer a comprehensive iPhone Availability Tracker.

The page is powered by data from Apple’s own availability widget and is updated every 15 minutes. The accuracy of Apple’s availability information has been questioned by some in the chaotic first two weeks since the 3G model launch, prompting Top Muffin to recommend calling stores first to confirm stock on-hand.

AT&T has authorized stores in its Northern California region to begin taking iPhone pre-sale orders with a promise of 72hr availability, according to the manager of one of the region’s busiest stores. In an email sent to store managers this morning, the wireless carrier said stores could promise customers they would have a phone in 3 days if they sign up for new service or upgrade their eligible hardware in-store and pass the requisite credit checks to establish a new two year service contract. Customers get a call from the store in three days when their phone arrives and are required to return to the store to complete service activation and pick up the handset.

The store manager said all AT&T retail stores in his region have been out of stock since the first wave of phones sold out in the days after its initial release on July 11. “It’s a marketing ploy by Apple,” he said, responding to a question about the lack of inventory at AT&T stores. “They release one or two hundred thousand phones and spread them all over and then do it again once those are sold out.” Describing the scenes of chaos in his store in the days after the launch, he said, “We actually prefer direct-ship. It keeps the crowds down so we can service our other customers and we don’t have to call the police to help with crowd control.”

Long lines are still present at the few Apple Stores in the country with inventory today, as iPhone buyers remain wiling to stand in line for two to three hours to make purchases directly from Apple.

Earlier today AT&T said iPhone 3G sales during the first twelve days were nearly double that of last year, despite shortages that have seen backorders up to three weeks at some of its retail stores nationwide. A company spokesman confirmed the official policy indicating a 13 to 14 day wait on direct-ship orders this afternoon, but indicated some regions could have greater availability than others.

Apple opened the first of two planned retail stores in Beijing, China over the weekend, at the Sanlitun retail complex. Enjoy our gallery of photos by several fine photographers. All images courtesy of Creative Commons or copyright the individual photographers.

Via BoingBoing

Perhaps AT&T employees in New York were so overwhelmed by the amount of business they did this week, they went time out of mind, or began speaking in tongues.

Check back last week for more iPhones.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says because Apple “knocked it out of the park on the first weekend” supply chain shortages could force iPhone 3G customers to scramble to find a phone or delay their purchase into August, when beefed up orders should replenish supply.

Apple’s iPhone availability tool indicated yesterday just over 25% of the compnay’s 188 US retail stores had any models of the iPhone 3G in stock, with the most-hard-to-find 16GB model in black available in only 18 stores countrywide. Only 13 stores reported all three models on hand, while the apparently least-popular 16GB model in white could still be found in 46 stores.

AT&T company spokesman Wes Warnock said Tuesday their 1,200 retail stores are also nearly out of the iPhone. “As we’re able to start restocking our stores, we will do so as fast as we can.”

Via Macworld

Photo by Jim Heid

Apple reports being sold out of all models of the iPhone 3G in 117 of its 188 retail outlets in the United States five days after bringing the product to market. The company updates a page on its website after 9pm in each time zone where you can check availability near you, but there have been reports the information is unreliable. Yesterday dozens of people waited in line to buy a phone at the Apple store in Kansas City based on notice the store was fully stocked, but apparently the store’s shipment never arrived and the manager had to begin placating angry customers by 1pm. If you live in many locations along the eastern seaboard, you might consider driving to New York, but there you will encounter the same long lines persisting in front of stores in other major markets such as San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta.

The Apple website says, “Shipments of iPhone 3G arrive most days and availability is updated nightly,” for each of its stores, but advises to “get there early” because the phones are sold on a first come-first served basis. With wait times exceeding three hours and the sale/activation process continuing to take upwards of half an hour in the store, you’ll invest time as well as money getting a new iPhone anytime soon.

Via Fortune.

Joining AT&T stores nationwide for the iPhone 3G launch, Apple retail stores in the US will open for business at 8am on July 11, according to information posted on Apple’s website. In addition to AT&T’s 1800 retail locations,  American early birds will have nearly 200 Apple Stores available for their early morning shopping pleasure.

The stores began receiving 3G in-store displays today, according to Gizmodo, which also has a nice gallery of display photos. In-store demo units of the new phone are due in stores tomorrow and store employees have been instructed to download apps from the App Store on the morning of July 11th, according to a post at MacRumors.

Photo via Fortune

My AT&T account tells me I’ll be eligible for a hardware upgrade on August 16th. I’ll probably wait at least until then to pick up a new iPhone 3G. And something tells me I won’t be disappointed.

Then again, I don’t have a sustainability agenda to push, as do a quintet of twenty-somethings calling themselves alternatively TheWhoFarm and Waiting for Apples, who began queuing up in front of the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan on Friday. The group is going for the Guinness Book of World’s Records entry for “longest time waiting in line to buy something,” according to Fortune, and hopes to persuade the next President of the United States to transform the White House’s 17-acre lawn into an organic farm.

It’s not clear what effect the group’s affinity for Apple may have on the company’s efforts to gain acceptance with Enterprise users.

Image via AppleInsider

By any measure of event marketing, Apple’s rollout of its next-gen iPhone 3G has already been a success, with stories having run in every major media outlet, from Time to Fortune to BusinessWeek, CNN, The New York Times as well as on Internet blog sites large and small, covering the phone’s worldwide debut on July 11.

Both Apple and AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive US wireless carrier and distribution partner, have posted videos hoping to get customers iReady for the big day and, according to a story in Fortune, reporter Philip Elmer-DeWitt says their approaches couldn’t be more different.

The Apple video, shot in the company’s signature stark, simple style, calmly lays out all the feature-based reasons you should believe that owning anything less than an iPhone may leave you unprepared to face the challenges of living in the modern world. As Elmer-DeWitt writes, “It’s hard to watch it to the end and not harbor iPhone 3G lust.”

At&T’s video, on the other hand, calls to mind the chaos and frustration likely to attend your effort to get your hands on one of the new phones on launch day, recommending that you may well want to visit an AT&T store in advance of July 11 to get your papers in order and your background check, uh, credit check out of the way to minimize hassles and delay when you come back to get the phone and have it activated.

As the countdown to launch day nears, more and more people are likely to be liveblogging the event and the pent-up demand for the device will continue to build. Some, however, are thinking more along the lines of Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, like Dameon Welch-Abernathy at The PhoneBoy Blog, who says, “Get iReady to be iScrewed.”

Check out this gallery of gorgeous photographs of the recently opened Apple Store in Sydney, Australia by photographer Christopher Chan. Born in Kuala Lumpur, the 34 year-old Chan keeps his day job as a Sydney-based Cisco Business Operations Manager when he’s not traveling the world shooting landscapes, architectural and other travel-related subjects. He uses a Canon 30D camera, loves his Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens the most, and works on a 15″ Macbook Pro running Mac OS X 10.5.3 and Aperture 2.1.

Photo by gazjoe

Officials in China have confirmed the location of Apple’s first retail operation on the Mainland, in Beijing’s Sanlitun district, according to China Tech News. The 3000+ square foot outlet, which will be managed and operated by employees of the Cupertino, CA-based computer giant, has been developed by Hong Kong’s Swire Properties as part of a 580,000 square foot mixed use project that includes additional retail and boutique hotel space housed in a 17 building complex.

The expectation is Apple will display and sell its full range of products directly for the first time to Chinese consumers, who up to now have had to acquire Apple gadgetry through licensed third-party retail agents.

Apple will open the three-floor store on July 19 and plans to launch a second Retail Store in Beijing during the Olympics, according to a report today in The Shanghai Daily.

Photo by Silvio Sousa Cabral

Amid reports of a surge in orders for all flavors of Apple gadgetry, anticipation of the iPhone 3g’s July 11 debut has the Apple Retail division preparing for the onslaught and chipmakers such as Broadcom and Marvel hoping happy days are here again.

Wall Street analyst Craig Berger, speaking for FBR Capital Markerts, says the bump in Apple’s supply chain activity “suggest[s] Apple continues to knock the cover off the ball, that its product cycle momentum is ramping, and that any consumer spending malaise in the U.S. or Europe has yet to impact Apple-related product demand.”

In a memo distributed throughout its Apple Stores division, company executives laid the ground rules for interacting with the public as 3G launch day approaches. Among the anticipated issues, the idea of getting on a waitlist for first dibs was shot down definitively by Apple corporate, and retail employees have been told to call any customer who has reserved an iPhone Personal Shopping session on or after July 11th to inform them Personal Shopping sessions will not apply to the iPhone 3G.

At an Apple Store in New York this week, actor Kiefer Sutherland is said to have made a strong case for obtaining a pre-launch iPhone 3G to no avail.

The company plans to hold worldwide retail meetings on July 6th to begin conveying more specific official launch procedures to its staff, according to a report at the Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Photo by Andrew Bulhak

Once hailed as a savior of the music industry’s physical distribution model, Starbucks will abandon the sale of CDs and iTunes gift cards in its thousands of outlets by September, according to a report released today by Silicon Valley Insider. The company will continue to offer free Wi-fi access to Apple’s online music store and may continue to try to sell entertainment online, but the dream of record company executives who saw Starbucks at the vanguard of a new class of unconventional sales outlets that could keep the CD alive in an age of digital downloads is now dead.

The company reported its first annual profit decline in eight years and saw half a dozen senior executives depart from its entertainment unit this year, forcing the Seattle-based retailer to look for ways to restart growth in its core business of selling $4 cups of coffee.

Photo by Christopher Chan

Proving themselves every bit as susceptible to consumer hype as their American counterparts, thousands of Apple fans attended the grand opening of Apple’s first retail store in Sydney last week, with several hundred having queued up as long as 31 hours prior to the opening hour.

Accommodated by agreeable weather, the large crowd helped continue Apple’s success in rolling out its innovative retail concept, which makes the stores themselves almost as much of a draw as the products inside.

More pics after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Confident now that it’s got a winning product, Apple is set to release the iPhone 3G simultaneously in 22 countries on July 11. And unlike the limited distribution model in the US, where consumers may only purchase phones from the company or from AT&T, overseas customers will be able to find the new phone in plenty of places.

Apple Insider reports that Deutch Telekom, T-Mobile’s German parent signed a first deal which will let Gravis sell iPhones attached to a T-Mobile service plan, allowing customers there to pick up a phone without visiting a T-Mobile retail outlet.

Dutch and Italian consumers will also have a variety of outlets to choose from, according to an item in Macworld. The high-street-availability distribution model appears to derive from the success Apple and UK carrier O2 had in bringing Carphone Warehouse on board to maximize availability of the product.

AT&T may be subsidizing up to $425 of the cost of each new iPhone it activates for service when the 2.0 3G models launch next month, Barron’s reports.

According to Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner, AT&T will cover an additional $125 premium over the carrier’s typical $200 smartphone subsidy because the company thinks the iPhone will increase subscribers and average revenue per user. Apple will receive an additional $100 bounty for every new AT&T customer who signs for service at an Apple Store.

The early book on the new phone is very bullish, with Reiner calling for 15 million units to be sold in 2008 and another 33 million in 2009.

Here’s the striking glass facade of Apple’s new megastore on Boston’s Boylston Street. The store opens later today (See IFOApplestore’s coverage of the overnight campout), but is being criticised for not blending with surrounding buildings.

But check the picture below, which shows the lot before Apple. Which do you prefer?

Picture from Flickr

Picture by Peter R. Wood