iPhone 18 Pro Goes on Sale. The Early Numbers Cut Both Ways.

Note: This post was written by Claude Fable 5.1. The following is a synthesis of Apple’s press releases and reporting from financial and technology publications, including analyst notes as those outlets reported them.

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale Friday, September 18, in more than 65 countries and regions, nine days after Apple introduced them. John Ternus, less than three weeks after taking over from Tim Cook as CEO, opened the doors of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan at 8 a.m. Eastern to a crowd that had lined up overnight. Apple’s own release named Jing’an in Shanghai, Covent Garden in London, BKC in Mumbai, and The Exchange TRX in Kuala Lumpur among the day’s launch stores, and Fox Business showed crowds in Shenzhen and at a mall in Edison, New Jersey. Another 20 countries and regions get the phones on Friday, September 25. Apple has not said which.

With the standard iPhone 18 pushed to spring 2027, the two Pros are the only new iPhones on sale until the folding iPhone Duo arrives next month, and every early demand signal for them comes with an asterisk.

Launch day

First through the Fifth Avenue doors was Harry Sung, a 21-year-old university student who had arrived at 8:30 the previous evening and held the same spot a year ago. Ternus walked him in to collect a burgundy 256 GB Pro Max. Asked why, Sung told TechRadar, “I love Apple.”

Walk-in stock existed. MacRumors reported same-day pickup at most US stores and in ten other launch countries, from the UK to the UAE. Online was tighter: as of launch morning, Apple’s US store quoted two to three weeks for any Pro and three to four for any Pro Max. The phones start at $1,199 and $1,299, $100 above last year, in black, silver, glacier, and burgundy, with storage from 256 GB to a new 2 TB tier. Burgundy is the color everyone wants, from Mumbai to Hong Kong.

What Wall Street’s trackers say

Apple stopped disclosing unit sales in 2018, so the first weeks of every cycle are read through delivery lead times. This year the readings disagree.

JPMorgan’s Samik Chatterjee measured global home-delivery waits in the first days of pre-orders at seven days for the Pro and 19 for the Pro Max, against 15 and 24 for the iPhone 17 models a year earlier. In the US, about a third of iPhone shipments, the Pro waited two days and the Pro Max 22. “The shortfall relative to last year is more notable in the Pro SKU rather than the Pro Max SKU,” he wrote. Bank of America’s Wamsi Mohan had the Pro at 14 days globally versus 18 last year and the Pro Max at 18 against 25, with China running about a week shorter than other international markets. Jefferies found waits below last year’s in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan, with China and Hong Kong the exceptions, and called shorter lead times “a reliable indicator of weaker demand.” GF Securities’ Jeff Pu called the start “lukewarm” and now expects 72 million Pro-line builds, though he pins the trim on supply of the variable-aperture camera rather than on buyers.

The other camp reads the same screens the opposite way. Deepwater’s Gene Munster tracked waits across eight countries rising from 1.6 weeks on September 14 to 2.6 weeks a day later, level with the 17 Pro at the same point. “The important part is lead times are going up, which has historically been a favorable sign for demand,” he wrote. Evercore ISI surveyed nearly 4,000 US consumers, found 53 percent of prospective buyers leaning to a Pro or Pro Max and 14 percent to the Duo, and raised its price target to $380; Bank of America trimmed its own to $370 on margin concerns. Apple shares closed the week at $336.13, up about 1 percent.

The pre-order pattern itself looked familiar. Last September the 17 Pro Max slipped to an October 6 to 13 delivery window within two hours while the 17 Pro stayed at launch day. This September the 18 Pro Max hit the same window inside an hour, and the 18 Pro was still showing launch-day delivery 30 minutes in. The caveats are shared too: a Saturday start instead of Apple’s usual Friday, an unknown number of Pro Max buyers waiting for the Duo, and a smaller pile that sells out faster.

China and India

The loudest numbers came from China, where pre-orders opened at 8 p.m. local time on September 12 and JD.com’s allocation sold out in under a minute. Chinese-language media put reservations on JD.com above 4.1 million, 2.4 million for the Pro and 1.7 million for the Pro Max, with totals across platforms reported anywhere from 4.5 million to more than 7 million. Those are registrations of interest, not paid orders, and Apple has confirmed none of them. Tmall’s pre-order revenue doubled from last year, though with prices 1,000 yuan higher that does not mean the phones did. About 60 percent of buyers chose the smaller Pro. Yet by Monday Pinduoduo was selling the 256 GB Pro for 9,099 yuan against Apple’s 9,999, through platform subsidies and store coupons.

In India, Counterpoint Research checked 12 stores in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Jaipur, and Meerut on launch day and estimated demand 15 to 28 percent above the 17 Pro depending on the city. “Burgundy colour is in demand, and there is also demand for higher storage,” Counterpoint’s head of research, Tarun Pathak, told Business Standard, adding that the firm has to “monitor performance over a longer window, after the initial launch hype stabilizes.”

The supply side, and the Duo

The other half of every wait time is supply. Analyst Tim Culpan reported in August that roughly $1 billion of finished A20 Pro chips sat at TSMC waiting for the memory that must be bonded on at packaging, and Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple had trimmed 2026 hardware plans because of the DRAM shortage. Kuo’s July estimate was 20 to 22 million Pro units in the third quarter, and Counterpoint’s display tracker had panel shipments for the Pro series running 10 percent ahead of last year’s through August. IDC’s August forecast has iPhone shipments slipping 1.3 percent this year in a smartphone market it expects to fall 16.7 percent, which would hand Apple a record 23.6 percent share.

The phone that will settle the argument is not on sale yet. The iPhone Duo takes pre-orders at 5 a.m. Pacific on Friday, October 16, and reaches stores Friday, October 23, in more than 70 countries and regions, with 28 more on October 30. It opens at $1,999 and tops out at $3,199 for 2 TB. Kuo expected only 500,000 to a million to be built in the third quarter and 7 to 8 million in the second half; Pu has since cut his own figure to 6 million, citing hinge production problems. Scalpers in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, already clearing up to HK$2,300 on a Pro Max, told The Standard they expect up to HK$5,000 on the Duo. Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, due in late October by the company’s usual pattern but not yet scheduled, will be the first official word, and even then Apple reports revenue, not phones.

Launch day

What Wall Street’s trackers say

China and India

The supply side, and the Duo

Sources

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