From a friend I have at Apple, they ship new iPhones in planes for every new release to deal with the order surge. Plane cabins stacked floor to ceiling with phones. An insane quantity of phones.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
256 points (98.9% liked)
Microblog Memes
7366 readers
1906 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So this is why they're all in Airplane mode when they're brand new? TIL
isn't it dangerous to pack a plane full of lithium ion batteries? it didn't go so well for UPS 006.
No. They're all contained with protection circuitry. Unprotected cells have different requirements.
This person works in the battery industry. Hello fellow battery expert!
I used to work in portable electronics. We had a battery vendor who wanted to overnight us some samples (like 100mAh cells).
To get them on the plane, they just bought a My Neighbor Totoro night light, popped it open, and shoved the battery inside. They didn't even tell us they were going to do that.
Sometimes it's a lot easier to skirt laws than explain why they're wrong.
Yeah plus, y'know... free night light.
"What, are you scared of my widdle duffel bag full of assorted raw lithium cells I scavenged from old laptops?"
I actually used to have a box of 500 18650 cells that I recovered from old laptops, and that box terrified me. They were all inspected for damage and were nearly stacked in little plastic compartments,but if one had decided to go off, it would have burned my house down.
Check out www.batteryhookup.com for a good time. I bought a few dozen unused modem backup batteries there for $50 and shucked enough 18650s out of them to build a new ebike battery.
hrm, that makes sense. I wonder if you could transport a bunch of batteries by shipping an Uninterruptible Power Supply with a huge array of Li-Ion batteries inside. they'd have protection circuitry and they'd be contained within the chassis, so seems like you should?
It’s totally fine in the US. Almost every passenger on the plane comes equipped with their own batteries in their pocket to take out any bad batteries should the need arise. One could say that domestic flights are only safe these days because everyone carries a battery or two with them.
Boeing 767-300 Freighter can hold a maximum payload of approximately 52.7 tons (116,200 pounds). It has a total cargo volume of about 15,469 cubic feet. That's a lot of iPhones.
231 million iPhones were sold in 2023. They weigh about 6 ounces but round up to 10 to account for packaging. Assume that 10% of those were sold at launch. That's 719 tons or 13 767-300 jets.
Obviously the vast majority are shipped by sea, but to handle the initial wave, they ship air.
Edit: obviously, most of those phones aren't going to the US, but it's still at least a few planes full.
Well an average smaller Apple Store has about $1.6 million dollars of just iPhones in inventory on a launch day and that’s just maybe 15-20 cubic feet densely packed.
Oh wait my hasty math was bad on the volume, closer to 150-200 cubic feet, allowing for the fact they are shipped in plastic totes that reduce the packing density.
Yeah that's just basic international air freight. It's not like apple is being special. They bid on pallet locations just pike everyone else, difference is is that they just wreck anyone other potential bidder during new phone releases
They let you do it if you're rich.
Apple also has a bunch of seats bought and paid for for every flight going to China.
So if someone from Apple has to get there quickly to handle a production issue, they can just go on the next flight. No need to reserve a seat.
sounds fake but if not it's hilariously evil towards environment
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20932487/apple-united-airlines-sfo-terminal-upgrades
It's true and reported by actual journalists. It was just United, not all flights.
Among Apple’s highest expenditures as part of its United contract include 50 business class seats from San Francisco to Shanghai daily, a figure United printed on a sign and mistakenly placed in public viewing at SFO early this year.
Crazy fact: it was only 12 days worth of iPhones. Meaning all of these phones will be sold within 12 days.
I decided to check out an MBP. Normally I can customize it and they give me a delivery estimate of about a week. Currently I can't customize it at all and delivery estimate is overnight. Literally what's in stock is all there is and then no more.
They're waiting for the storm to pass, it's still 10% now
As of today, it’s 145% on Chinese imports.
Shortly after the Budget Lab’s original publication, the White House clarified that the 125% China tariffs were on top of, not inclusive of, the 20% IEEPA tariffs already in place, making the maximum rate on Chinese imports 145%. This report revises our numbers to reflect the clarified policy.
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/fiscal-and-economic-effects-revised-april-9-tariffs
I expect them to get around this tarrif, but I have no clue how hard that will be for them. They also managed to stock up on cash in Ireland because they didn't want to move it to the US and that didn't seem to hurt them.
Oh wow. I've been needing to upgrade for a while and happened to be in a place where I was ready to make the purchase. The day the news about the most regressive tax scheme in history hit I went through the whole normal process of selecting all the completely insanely priced upgrade options I needed and placed the order. It's due next week - I must have been one of the last ones.
How does it avoid tariffs?
By arriving before the tariffs do
Ah, thanks mate.
Arriving before Trump? That's a bold move.
This is why crApple phones cost so much, flying in First Class.
I just upgraded six months early to avoid any potential tariffs.