Apple's first foldable phone had its moment in India on Friday morning, and almost nobody showed up to watch.
At the Saket store in Delhi, rows of chairs set out for the usual launch-day queue sat empty at 7 am. By the time doors opened at 8, only three or four customers had gathered, outnumbered by Apple staff and reporters. A similar scene played out in Noida, where no more than four people were waiting when the store opened its gates, according to a report by India Today Tech, whose correspondent visited both locations.
The device in question is the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone, which starts at Rs 2,99,900 in India, among the costliest phones sold in the country. Reports ahead of launch day said the first week of inventory, including stock at the busy Saket and Mumbai BKC stores, had already been booked through pre-orders.
So the stock was apparently spoken for. The queues just weren't there to prove it.
A booking system, not a lack of interest
The simplest explanation is logistics. Apple required customers in India to reserve online booking or in-store pickup slots for the iPhone Duo, rather than letting people walk in and hope for the best. Anmol Singh, who drove from Chandigarh to collect his phone, said it took him nearly half an hour just to lock down an 8 am pickup slot. Once you've got a confirmed slot, there's little reason to camp outside a mall before dawn, and without one, there's little incentive to queue for stock that may already be gone.
That marks a shift from how Apple ran things during the iPhone 18 Pro launch, when customers without prior bookings were reportedly turned away at the door. A booking-led system this time may have simply moved the queue online, out of sight of anyone standing outside the store with a camera.
Apple has not said how many Duo units went to its Delhi-NCR stores, so there's no way to measure actual allocation against the modest turnout. The report also notes that tighter purchase controls could be aimed at curbing resellers who buy multiple units of a hot new phone to flip at a markup, though there's no confirmation that was the specific intent in India.
A different picture in China
The contrast with China was stark. Reports there described strong pre-order demand, with some iPhone Duo variants selling out quickly enough to push delivery estimates back, generating the kind of online buzz usually attached to a flagship Apple launch.
Whether that means Indian buyers are cooler on Apple's first fold is harder to say. Queues have long served as a visible stand-in for genuine demand, good for a photo and a trending hashtag, but they're an imperfect measure of what's actually selling. A nearly Rs 3-lakh phone, first-generation compromises included, was never going to pull the kind of walk-in crowd an annual iPhone refresh does.
For now, the Duo's first sales day in India reads as a quiet one at the storefront and, by most accounts, a sold-out one on the books. Apple hasn't released nationwide sales figures, and it's unclear if or when it will.
MDFiled by The Mobile Desk
Phones from leak to launch to price cut: what was announced, what it costs where, and when it goes on sale. Indian launches and prices included, not appended.
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