Hacker News Reader

Normalised by the number of countries it was available in, it didn't do any better than the 4S (from @asymco).

That's not a fair comparison. Its only fair if pre-orders are uniform across countries. Adding a bunch of smaller countries with low volume would drag the number way down.

A much more meaningful comparison would be pre-orders in a single major market, e.g. the US.

Remember projections of worst case scenario being 5Million by analysts? You will see the same analysts saying today Pre Orders blew their mind.

Talking to some friends who work in phone shops here in the UK it's pretty apparent the stock just isn't available. There haven't been enough phones to cover pre-orders let alone the constant stream of people coming in every day asking if they have any iPhone 5s available.