iPhone mules are taking our handsets, damnit!

Probably...

I bought one from the Apple Store in Bristol a couple of weeks ago - I rang to see if they had any in about 10:30am and they'd just had a bunch turn up. I hotfoooted it down there to find an already-lengthy queue predominantly made of up swarthy-looking non-anglo-saxon types all paying £1200 in either £20 or £50 notes for two unlocked 32GB models.

My apologies of course for the steroetypical Mail-esque racial profiling but they didn't exactly look like your typical Apple user....

small world

Our world is too small now to have staggered releases of popular items.

I can't really blame someone for seeing an opportunity and going for it.

I can't imagine Apple wants to do it this way

Apple has simply been unable to keep production up with demand, so they have staggered the release. This is partly a consequence of the way they structure their product line (one blockbuster product release of one model once a year, whereas many competitors release far more models and let a new one trickle out every few months) and it's partly a consequence of getting production levels wrong for this product, which may be as much about suppliers having problems as Apple directly.

I'm sure Apple would prefer to have enough for the whole world at once. They would make more money that way.

I've made a few hundred quid myself buying iPhone 4s and selling them to Russians on eBay. (The opportunity to do this has now gone, but a couple of months back it was a nice little earner). There's nothing wrong with this at all. I've even made a couple of Russians happy, and they need this more than we do.

Free trade...

...until the EU make it illegal (again). When a company causes a price disparity (either through malice, collusion or ineptitude) a free market will self-correct to a large extent. This story (if tru; it's the Mail FFS) is simply an example of that happening.

It doesn't always happen in reverse though, sometimes the people who are meant to protect free trade and an open market (e.g. the EU) are to kill it off. This is why you can't buy cheap Levi's, CDs, DVDs etc from outside the EU anyone. The government has decided the free market is no longer in your interest.

Profiteering

Seems like a lot of indians queueing up in Regent Street the times I've been there - they've obviously been paid to get them in order to beat the customer limit. They all pay in cash and don't look like typical tech/fashion savvy users!

Hah

Why do you suppose when I got to "Eastern European" the mystery of where this article came from vanished? I must have the gift of premonition.

The start of this article...

...should be read in the voice of Grandpa Simpson.

El Reg fails at investigating the story and goes for racist card

There is actually a lot of truth in this mail/telegraph story, I myself have queued outside Regent St, Covent Garden and the Westfield centre Apple shops only to see these huge queues 200+ of mostly ragged looking indians each day (I tried 3 days in a row before giving up), for the most part they turn up way after you, jump the queue next to their gang mates, argue/fight with the other gangs and often intimidate people in the queue. I saw the same faces over and over each morning and was told by the security guards that they start queueing at 9pm the previous evening. Whatever stocks those Apple stores get I can assure you that not a single phone is making it to a uk customer who actually wants it for themselves.

Whilst I accept that its a market correction that was bound to happen due to the pathetic supply and purchase system that apple has in place, I dont accept that decent people should be hounded, intimidated and forced to queue all night when a simple mechanism for ensuring payment by card only and 1 phone per card would resolve this.

In the end I gave up and decided to go for an Android Galaxy S and am very happy with it!

Consumers v. Corporations

When we exercise our market freedoms, we are guilty of shopping at the 'grey market'. When corporation offshore much of their production and/or services - they are being efficient. I normally reject the term 'grey market' because of exactly this - there's nothing grey about it at all, just that the corporations don't want you to enjoy the freedoms that they do.