Apple’s new iPhone 6s is poised to take most of the world by storm — and the rest by mail.
The company claims that its latest gadget, which had its initial launch on Friday, should be available in 130 countries by the end of the year, and our survey of regional Apple home pages gives us a pretty good idea of what the big board in Cupertino’s war room might look like. Check it out below.
Photo: Evan Killham/Cult of Mac. Made with Mapchart.
This is a fairly conservative estimate, like our timing map on Monday; for example, French Guiana in South America is a “department” of France, but we couldn’t verify definitively when it might see the 6s (and whether it would receive it along with its parent country or along with the rest of the Latin American region), so we just left it out. Really sorry about that, Guiana.
Still, this map shows some other interesting gaps. Look at poor Belarus and the Ukraine in Eastern Europe. Every country around them has its own Apple page with an iPhone 6s section, but they’re just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. It’s the same, apparently, with every single country that ends in “-stan.”
And that’s just eerie.
But it’s not like these countries are completely left out because we live in the future, and the Internet can get you anything you want. So anyone in these countries who wants an iPhone 6s need only head over to the nearest regional ebay page and start searching. The auction site has a presence in 26 countries in four continents (sorry, Antarctica).
But ebay can be expensive; sellers and bidders alike are driving the price of iPhone 6s models, which have MSRPs between $649 and $849 depending on storage, hundreds of dollars higher.
Another option would be to travel to a “green” company and pick one up. Or, iPhone 6s wanters could just head for the “Other” category and wait for someone to smuggle the phones in. When the iPhone 6 launched last year, Chinese border agents had a heck of a time with people trying to sneak the new gadgets into the mainland from Hong Kong before their official release. Officers claim that they seized almost 2,000 stowaway phones, and eight of those came across the border in a man’s three layers of underpants.
If he’d succeeded, we don’t know if that guy would have given his buyers a choice between crotch phones or butt phones, but we’re sure it wouldn’t have affected the black-market price at all.
