Following record-breaking pre-orders, the iPhone 5 officially goes on sale today in nine countries, including Australia, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, Germany, the UK and the US.
The launches of Apple products have become spectacles due to the large queues that form outside Apple Stores and the surrounding hype. This year, people in both the UK and US started queuing nearly a full week in advance.
While the long queues have traditionally been full of Apple-fanatics, a trend seen in recent product launches, including this one, is the growing presence of people paid to queue for commercial purposes and others seeking free publicity.
In Australia, a team of employees from Mobile Phone Finder took up position at the front of the queue outside the flagship Apple Store, in Sydney, three days ago, hoping to be the first to own an iPhone 5 and grab the associated publicity. But Apple appears to have had other plans.
According to reports, when the store doors opened, the Mobile Phone Finder representatives were "aggressively held back" by Apple PR staff upon entering the store. The result was that a young couple (and genuine Apple fans) who had arrived just 17 hours before the doors opened, and who were behind about 30 people in the queue, emerged as the first owners of the new handset.
Gizmodo Australia says that while Apple won't comment officially on the matter, "rumours surrounding the launch of the iPhone 5 point to the fact that Apple didn't want it becoming a commercial exercise for another company to piggyback on".
Apple marketing
Pre-orders for the new iPhone opened on Friday last week and Apple reported that two million orders were received in the first 24 hours - double the figure for the previous iPhone over the same period.
Speaking to AFP, Gartner analyst Van Baker said: "The fact that the iPhone 5 is doing as well as it is opposed to other phones is a tribute to Apple marketing. They are really good at this."
Samsung has not missed the opportunity to take a dig at Apple in light of some of the criticism around the widely discussed lack of innovative features in the new iPhone. Apple's biggest rival has launched a campaign with both print and video ads, which seek to highlight the features of the Galaxy S3 compared to those of the iPhone 5.
Baker says of the ads: "I had to laugh at the Samsung ads. It's hardware geeks throwing rocks at Apple; but Apple has a good sense of what is important to include and when."
The iPhone 5 features a four-inch Retina display, thinner, lighter design, a faster processor and LTE support. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has said based on the strong pre-order numbers, he predicts Apple will achieve sales of between six million and 10 million units during the opening weekend. The iPhone 4S sold four million units during its first weekend of sales.
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