iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max are hardest iPhones to get your hands on right now

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iPhone 12 Pro Max screen looks great, even from an angle.
Customers can't get enough of Apple's top-tier smartphones this year.
Photo: Apple

The iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max are reportedly proving to be customer favorites this year, based on a new report by J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee.

In a note to clients, Chatterjee observed that the lead times for the two high-end iPhones “continue to build,” representing a “favorable indicator of customer demand.”

At present, the lead time for an iPhone 12 Pro is around 27 days. That’s the longest it has been since the first week the new iPhone was available. Meanwhile, lead times for the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 continue to shorten.

Apple doesn’t break down sales of the iPhone into different models for competitive reasons. (For the past several years, it’s also not broken them down into unit sales as it once did.)

In some ways, the fact that the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max would be the top-selling models this year seems surprising. There is arguably less to distinguish the lower-end iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro than has distinguished the higher and lower-tier iPhones in previous years — with the exception of the camera setup which is vastly superior on the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max.

Apple expecting big things of iPhone 12

According to a previous report, Apple was expecting the iPhone 12 to be this year’s big seller. Apple’s original order split for the new phones was supposedly as follows: the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max each making up 20% of Apple orders, and the 6.1-inch iPhone 12 representing 40%.

It is, of course, worth noting that judging demand by availability isn’t necessarily a wholly accurate metric. If Apple produced more of the regular iPhone 12 models, they would be more available. Meanwhile, an iPhone 12 Pro that Apple made fewer of would appear less available, based on the fact that there aren’t as many of them to go around.

Still, this isn’t a bad situation for Apple to be in. If Apple genuinely has underestimated how many people want to spend more buying a top-end iPhone it’s a lot better than this year’s handsets having way more supply than demand.

Which iPhone, if any, are you getting this year? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: MarketWatch

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