Yesterday I posted the same question to my followers on X, Threads, and Mastodon:1

Poll, only for people who have pre-ordered a Duo. When is your
delivery/pickup date?

• October
• November
• December
• January

The results were interesting; I’m glad I asked.

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XThreadsMastodonTotal

October36%38%39%37%

November35%42%45%39%

December10%9%8%10%

January19%11%8%14%

Responses1,3821,0344492,865

Observations:

• There were way more people who successfully got October ship dates than I expected. It’s very close to even with November ship dates.

• The fact that there are fewer December ship dates than January, is to me, a sign of Apple’s appreciation for the holidays. I think Apple is only promising “December” for shipments they are 100 percent certain they can deliver by Christmas. I bet a bunch of the orders promised for January will in fact ship in December — albeit perhaps too-late-for-Christmas December.

• Apparently some configurations are getting an estimated date of February 1. I wish I’d listed February as an option, but I don’t think it would have made a big difference.

• Per MacRumors today, some pre-order estimates are already moving up, like from early December to late November.

No one should mistake my audience as representative of the general public in any poll, but I bet my audience is at least ballpark representative of the general public when it comes to something like pre-ordering, at the crack of dawn, a new iPhone form factor that costs $2000 to $3200.

1. I didn’t ask on Bluesky because — despite launching over three years ago — it still lacks a poll feature. There’s some kind of third-party thing called poll.blue, but I couldn’t be bothered. ↩︎