Victim of its Own Success, Apple Delays iPhone 4 Ship Date

Apple spares little effort when it comes making splashy announcements. But when it comes to the other sort of news - the kind that its PR department famously declines to talk about - well, that's an iPhone of a different color.

The Apple Store added that notation next to a glossy photo of the black version of the iPhone 4. It also disclosed that the white iPhone "remains currently unavailable for pre-order or in-store pickup." Earlier today, Apple pushed back the ship date from June 24 to July 2. Later on, it changed that to July 14.

This was a rare embarrassment for an image-conscious company that rarely suffers through public missteps. All this is likely to get quickly forgotten once the sales registers ring up. This morning Apple reported that it had received more than 600,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4. And AT&T said that pre-orders for the device were 10 times greater than on the first day of pre-orders for the iiPhone 3GS a year ago. (Best Buy said this afternoon that it is no longer accepting pre-orders.)

Watching the day's events roll out, Sam Diaz of ZDNet offered one of the best takes. If this were any other company, he correctly noted, this concatenation of fiascoes would be considered "a complete train wreck."

Consumers would be up-in-arms, demanding refunds, storming out of stores and swearing to not come back until these companies can get their acts together. But this is Apple - and that means that the truly faithful will 1) keep trying, no matter the obstacles thrown at them and 2) forgive the shortcomings the moment they get a confirmation saying the order was successful. And the beauty of it is that this can pretty much happen without the PR team in Cupertino even having to think for a minute about "spin control."