iPhone 13 Preorders Are Live, and the Pro Models Are Already Slipping

Set an alarm for 5am if you’re on the West Coast, because that’s when Apple flipped the switch on iPhone 13 preorders this morning. Same ritual as every year: refresh the Apple Store app, watch it crash or spin, then either sail through checkout or get bounced into a queue. The base iPhone 13 starts at $799, and if you want the big Pro Max, that’s $1,099 before you start adding storage.

What’s notable this year isn’t the pricing tiers themselves — they’re basically where you’d expect them to land — it’s how fast the popular Pro configurations moved. Reports are already coming in that certain Pro and Pro Max builds, particularly the more desirable color and storage combos, sold out of their initial shipping windows within the first hour or two of preorders opening. If you wanted a September 24 delivery on a Sierra Blue Pro Max with meaningful storage, you may already be looking at October.

This tracks with what’s been happening across consumer electronics all year. Chip supply has been tight industry-wide, and Apple, despite being about as good as any company on earth at managing a supply chain, isn’t immune. The rumor mill has been warning about component constraints affecting iPhone 13 production for weeks now, and today’s preorder crunch is the first real, visible evidence of that: not empty shelves, but shrinking delivery windows within hours of launch.

Why this matters beyond the fanboy scramble

It’s worth stepping back from the “which color did you get” chatter for a second. A sellout this fast, this early, on a phone that is an iterative upgrade rather than a dramatic redesign, says something about demand resilience. This is the same basic shape as the iPhone 12 with a smaller notch, a faster chip, better cameras, and a higher refresh rate on the Pro models — nice improvements, not a reinvention. And yet people are lining up digitally at dawn to lock one down before their preferred configuration disappears.

Part of that is pent-up upgrade demand from people still on iPhone 11s or older. Part of it is Apple’s marketing machine doing what it always does. But part of it, I think, is genuine anxiety about supply timelines bleeding into consumer behavior — buy now because who knows what October or November availability looks like, given everything we’ve all read about chip shortages hitting cars, game consoles, and now phones.

If you’re still deciding, my honest take: the base iPhone 13 is probably the sweet spot for most people this year. The Pro’s ProMotion display and extra camera are genuinely nice, but they’re also the configurations getting squeezed first by supply constraints, so you’ll wait longer and pay more for marginal gains unless computational photography headroom or the 120Hz screen is a must-have for you.

General availability — meaning walk into a store or have it show up without a preorder — arrives September 24. Between now and then, expect a steady stream of unboxing videos, teardown reports, and the usual arguments about whether “Pro” phones are worth the premium. Standard iPhone launch week, just with slightly more supply-chain anxiety baked in than usual.