I am currently traveling, but dutifully set my alarm to order an iPhone Duo. Having multiple devices is the way to go in these situations, so I was at my laptop and had my iPhone.

The Apple Store app on my phone loaded first, and that’s when I learned a terrible truth:

I could only choose Apple Stores near me for pickup, and uhhh, I am not flying across the country again next week to pick this thing up.

I just tried again, out from under the pressure of doing this in the first few minutes of availability, and for the life of me, I cannot find a way to tell the app you want to pick up a phone someplace other than your current immediate region.

By the time the website came up over six minutes later — where you can search for other Apple Stores1 — my ship date had already slipped to the end of November or early December.

It seems that my work2 on Widgetsmith and our other apps will be constrained to the simulator a little longer. It is also nice to have the new thing when it’s new, so I can write and talk about it when it’s new.

I guess the upside is that, now that shipping dates have slipped into 2027, the iPhone Duo will be new for a long time.

Best I can tell, there is not a way to change a delivery into a pickup, but currently the Apple Store support chat just won’t connect. Maybe they can change it, or I’ll get lucky with a walk-in, but this is a really dumb limitation of the Apple Store app.

  1. I’m actually traveling again on launch day, so I wanted to pre-order at an Apple Store in the city where I will be. So even if the only other option was “Your Home Apple Store,” I’d still be stuck. ↩︎

  2. I know some folks got calls from their local Apple Store Business Reps about pre-ordering through them. I had a voicemail from my store, but this morning realized they never called me back after I left them a voicemail in return. I guess that’s okay; I’ve seen folks say phones ordered that way are not arriving until the end of January. ↩︎