Looking to order an Apple Watch? Now would be the time, as reports are coming in that with production back on track, orders being placed right now could be ready for shipment in as early as 2 to 3 weeks.
Apple Watch has singlehandedly defeated the sales of all Android Wear devices combined, signaling the massive demand the wearable gathered for itself. All of this, despite apparent production constraints that saw Apple’s smartwatch being available in limited number as interested consumers saw themselves waiting for as long as two months to get their hands on the gadget.
DigiTimes, a Taiwanese publishing, is reporting that the low production rate of the Apple Watch can be attributed to an apparent labor shortage during the Lunar New Year as Quanta had to borrow manpower from other manufacturers. Earlier rumors had placed the blame on troubling Taptic Engines for the watch, which lead to Apple cutting back on the number of units manufactured. Talking about the labor shortage, Quanta vice chairman CC Leung further said that, “However, Quanta already has sufficient capacity to manufacture all the orders and should see a giant contribution from its wearable device business in the second quarter.”
Now of course he never mentions what wearable exactly, but given that Quanta is the primary manufacturer of the Apple Watch, it’s not too hard to establish the connection between the labor shortage – and Apple Watch shortage. Apple had made no secret about this matter, and had publicly acknowledged that Apple Watch availability will be limited in the start as it battled out with the so called constraints.
A few weeks ago we saw shipment times being reduced by a few days for some Apple Watch models on the Apple Online Store, and today these seem to have been further reduced, though some exceptions might remain. If you place an order for the watch from today onwards, you are looking at an estimated delivery time of 2 to 3 weeks and 3 to 5 weeks for the 38mm case size models.
The larger 42mm models however, are stated to be delivered by July. Hopefully, if the news about labor shortage is true, and Quanta is upping its productions, we should see these delivery times being reduced even further.
(Source: DigiTimes)
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