The gist: I place an order, the order page gives a delivery date, I click confirm, and the confirmation page gives a new date, a week later than what had just been shown a few seconds earlier. I’ve certainly made extensive use of Apple’s online store over the years, and this is something I’ve never seen before, and it’s just happened twice in a row. I’m curious whether others have experienced this?
[Extended version follows, if anyone wants more detail.]
Having received a very generous Apple gift card as an early Christmas present, on 12/22 I ordered a refurb iPad Air and a Magic Keyboard. Prior to clicking the order confirmation button, the site said the items would deliver on 12/23. I clicked confirm, and the next page acknowledged the order, and said the items would deliver 12/29-31. That struck me as odd, and the Apple chat person couldn’t offer any explanation.
I received the initial order confirmation email, with the same (later) dates, and no further communication. Today I checked the order status to find that the order had been cancelled on 12/25! So I placed another order today, for the same two products (the gift card was back at full value). The final page before I clicked the confirm button showed an optional delivery date of 12/30 for $8, or 12/31 for free. I chose the latter, and confirmed the order. And the exact same thing happened again: the confirmation page was displayed with “your items will be delivered between 1/6 and 1/9”!
It’s a bug in their system software. The code that generates the estimate on the order page is different from the code that generates the estimate on the confirmation page and one of them is wrong.
The order page is based only on local information (e.g. what’s in stock at which warehouses), but after a shipping label is generated, it also takes into account the estimated delay from the shipper (which may be higher than expected during the holiday season).
Of course, there could be other reasons that are not as obvious to me.
A loss prevention algorithm flagged the transaction for some reason (this is not uncommon on legitimate orders, unfortunately)
An expected shipment of merchandise to a distribution center was delayed.
Holiday season is very chaotic for retailers and shippers, with high transaction volumes and high numbers of seasonal workers. This affects pretty much every aspect of retailers’ and shipping companies’ operations.
This thread took some detours into how online orders can be disrupted despite not being fraudulent:
Thanks for the input, @shamino and @halfsmoke. I guess we’ll see what happens…will order #2 get unceremoniously cancelled (with no notification) like order #1? Or will Apple revert to its former “under-promise and over-deliver” behavior that I was accustomed to with previous online orders? So far, the order status is “processing”.
I had something similar happen. I had a longtime credit on my Apple account, so I decided to purchase an Apple TV and a couple of cables. Before I hit “confirm,” the expected delivery date was the next day; after I hit “confirm,” the expected delivery date was more than a week later. I called Apple Support, and they canceled the order and listened while I placed it again, only to get the same result. They canceled the second order, and I tried adding an extra $9.00 to have the items delivered from the store within two hours. This time when I hit “confirm,” the message that I received was that there wasn’t enough money in my payment method (even though my Apple credit was larger than the total). I thought about accessing a credit card to pay the $9.00, but the credit card options were all greyed out, and I got a message saying that the credit card options were unavailable because my Apple credit more than covered the amount of the purchase. The Apple rep then transferred me to Apple Sales, who suggested that the problem was that I had opted for AppleCare and that I should remove that from the order. I tried again without AppleCare (with the $9.00 charge), but I again received a message that there wasn’t enough money in my account to cover the purchase (even though there clearly was). I finally gave up and placed the order with a week-long-plus delivery date. After processing for several days, the items arrived about six days later.
While we’re on the subject of Apple’s messed-up ordering system, I’ve been trying to upgrade my daughter’s iPhone. I went to the Apple web site, filled out the form, indicating that I’m upgrading a line on Verizon. And the system says that they can’t connect to Verizon’s server, offering me instead the ability to purchase it without activation, so I’ll have to do that on my own with Verizon after receiving the new phone. Since I don’t want to do this, I canceled the order and tried again a few days later. … For several weeks.
I finally gave up and placed the order directly via Verizon, which worked fine.
Unfortunately, Verizon’s trade-in price for the old phone is $40 less than Apple’s trade-in price. But on the plus side, Verizon applied the trade-in credit to the new phone at the time of purchase, instead of waiting for the old one to be received and inspected.
The same thing happened a month prior when I upgraded my wife’s phone. But in that case, Apple was able to connect to Verizon and process the upgrade on the second attempt.
Not the exact same scenario, but a glitch between Apple and (in my case) AT&T is what put me on the “order from AT&T instead of Apple” set of rails. To be fair, this was many years (and many phones) ago, and they may have corrected it by now. But heck, AT&T essentially gives you the phone in return for three more years of contractual obligation, so if like me you have no intention of switching, it’s worth the risk.
I’ve noticed an increased frequency of poorly projected delivery dates from multiple reputable vendors in the last year. At the time of purchase, they might say “in stock, delivery expected tomorrow” or at least sometime in the next few days, then a day or so later they’ll send an updated delivery date with their apologies. If the updated projection is that delivery will be delayed one day or maybe two, there’s a good chance that is accurate. If the updated projection is for delivery 3-5 days later, I’ve come to assume that means “one or two weeks” and will cancel the order. I find myself wondering if some AI supply chain optimizer is not yet fully optimized.
I know my reply is probably not very helpful, as it is just my recent experience. I ordered a MacBook Air on Wednesday, the 31st, from the Apple online store, and got a delivery date of January 5th. I ordered it for someone else, she paid for it, and provided her information for billing but my information for shipping. I thought that might send a red flag, but so far, not. Yesterday (the 1st), I received an email and text confirming the delivery date. No changes or amended delivery dates (yet). Again, probably not much help, but at least the problems are not happening to everyone. Of course, maybe I should not have written this until I actually have it in my hands.
While standing at an Apple store, I asked what the stock of iphones was. To get a military discount, I had to order the phones online to pickup in the store. Took 2 hours So once my “pickup time” came around, I stood in line to get the phones they had right there, in the store. Unfortunately, that didn’t involve them helping me move my stuff from my old phone to the new one. Once that got done, I was able to hand them my old phone that they already checked for trade in value, and have them check it again, and they gave me cash on my apple savings account. I did this with 2 phones at the same time. Got $100 for my iphone 12 mini and $140 for the iphone 12. Upgraded both to the iphone 17. The iphone 17 pros were out of stock. Overall, even though I had to order inside the store, it went pretty well.
OK. The final scores are in. The verdict? Apple online ordering (sample size = 1) has gotten very strange.
Products ordered: a refurb iPad Air 11” and compatible Magic Keyboard
Order placed 12/22/2025. Delivery date prior to clicking “Confirm” 12/23. Afterward 12/29-31.
Order cancelled by Apple, no notice or reason given, 12/25.
Reorder placed 12/27. Delivery date prior to clicking “Confirm” 12/31. Afterward 1/5-7 (iPad), 1/6-8 (keyboard).
Actual delivery dates: iPad 1/2; keyboard 1/5.
I’m at a loss to understand how a company like Apple can be so…well, weird with something as fundamental as order fulfillment, yet a company like Amazon can be so rock-solid predictable (with rare exceptions).
So once my “pickup time” came around, I stood in line to get the phones they had right there, in the store. Unfortunately, that didn’t involve them helping me move my stuff from my old phone to the new one. Once that got done, I was able to hand them my old phone that they already checked for trade in value, and have them check it again, and they gave me cash on my apple savings account. I did this with 2 phones at the same time. Got $100 for my iphone 12 mini and $140 for the iphone 12. Upgraded both to the iphone 17. The iphone 17 pros were out of stock. Overall, even though I had to order inside the store, it went pretty well.