Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

thenextweb.com

246 pointskevinSuttle207 comments

The fact that it is 2012 and stores still refuse to just let you give them money and then have them ship you a product is ridiculous. I don't want to sit here and wait for a store to open or for things to come 'back in stock' to buy a phone. That's why we invented computers, to automate boring tasks.

I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. Problem solved.

Of course, that won't happen any time soon, because being sold out inexplicably generates buzz like the present article.

This is nice in theory. I think this doesn't happen because when you take people's money they're suddenly your "customers" and think they're entitled to a phone ASAP and if there are any unexpected delays you have upset the hoard. As soon as you take someone's money, they're a customer support liability.

Some business charge customers only when the product is shipped.

In Denmark thats the law. Its illegal to charge the customer, if you haven't shipped the product.

Pretty much.

If you're running a brick and mortar store, you want to serve the customers who are there now. That means not cannibalizing your inventory by mailing to someone who ordered last week. You also want people to come back to your store.

It is irrational for the store to mail you one when it comes in stock, though they should have a web-based corporate distributor that they can direct you to.

This! Google just recently saw this happen with the Nexus 7 this summer. People were charged when they preordered and then the lack of a hard ship date caused Google to have to spend countless hours in customer support. Once somebody has paid you, the can of worms is open.

They could also want to control the amount of unearned revenue on their books.

The concept of "we charge your card when the product ships" was invented how many years ago? It sounds like Google is retrofitting physical products into a store that was never meant to handle them.

Even if they only take a hold to ensure the funds are on the card, many (most?) banks won't tell you that the money wasn't charged yet, and they'll make it unavailable.

Then why don't they just charge the card before they ship... and if that fails then they send you an email saying so, amend your details within 48 hours or it ships to the next person in line.

Not exactly difficult.

...and if they semi-randomly charge someone over their credit limit or overdraft their bank account, or someone forgets entirely that they signed up and submits a chargeback?

Holds usually only last for a week, tops.

"many (most?) banks won't tell you that the money wasn't charged yet"

WTF?

I can log in to any bank and it'll tell me within a few moments of when a charge was made.

> I can log in to any bank and it'll tell me within a few moments of when a charge was made.

No you can't; that's exactly the issue. Most people don't know the difference between an authorization and a charge. What you see on online banking as "pending charges" or "holds" are authorizations. No money has moved hands -- your bank balance has not gone down, the merchant's bank balance has not gone up, there's not even an in-flight ACH somewhere yet to be processed.

Literally all these entries on your online banking represent is a message of intent from the merchant to charge that much to your card in the near future. Even your bank does not yet know if the merchant actually captured the funds and they'll be settled (the money will move) soon or if they only performed the authorization. They could void the authorization or let it expire itself without ever charging the card.

Hence the comment -- even if Google only performs an authorization, it looks to the customer like they paid, and the bank won't tell the customer otherwise. That makes using authorizations to hold preorders untenable from a customer service standpoint even if it were technically possible, which it really isn't due to the short period authorizations are valid outside the hotel, travel and rental industries.

My bank, ING Direct, lists authorizations and charges in completely separate areas when you login. Authorizations first, then charges.

Our banks all work the same. The settled transactions list you're talking about does not update "within a few moments" as the comment I was replying to said, if a charge was even made.

The fastest your bank could possibly show a charge I make to it right now is tomorrow. Most will take longer than that. If it's near a weekend, it could take 3 or more calendar days. The authorization can show up immediately, the charge cannot.

Authorizations happen in real-time over the card networks. Settlements, where the charges get recorded and the funds actually move, happen in daily batches (or even less often).

In the meantime, customers assume they have paid for something, because they see it in the pending charges or holds list, whether funds were captured or not. Again, refer to previous comments on why that makes authorizing cards for the full amount of preorders problematic.

A backlog of orders pushes back your shipping date by two months. One random day you get an email saying "Your item has shipped and your card has been charged". Is it not plausible that you've found an alternate in the meantime? Or that your financial situation has changed?

It does not seem to cause any problem to Amazon, Apple, or the vast majority of other shops out there. The biggest shop debit your card when they ship and let you cancel at any time.

Google is crafting buzz like Apple is doing with the queues at the Apple store or their irritating "reserve your iPhone" that in reality does not reserve anything. A difference though, if you don't want to bother, you can simply order online and it get it delivered the old boring way once it is back in stock. The Nexus can only be bought online.

(disclaimer: a bit bitter after having tried to buy a Nexus 4 today)

On the other hand, why not just wait a week 'till all the fervor is over. If you're cool-headed enough to realize this is all to build buzz, then surely you can wait a week.

That would be fine if Google made an announcement that they expect to take orders again in n weeks.

Your assumption is that Google is doing this to build buzz.

They could just as well have component supply problems.

Consumers usually have an expectation of quick turnaround, and when they don't have a quick turnaround, they expect good feedback about when to expect what they paid for to be delivered to them.

In light of that, no, we don't really have the technology to automate all of those business decisions (especially so early in the product lifespan) and give a precise prediction about when a consumer can expect the product with acceptable reliability. There are too many factors that can delay delivery by a day or two, and accuracy within a day is extremely important for good customer service.

For a mass-market phone like this "It'll get there when it gets there!' is not an acceptable response to people who need a phone right now, or in the very near future. This isn't a raspberry pi.

There's no use pretending that high tech supply chain management is a simple process, and any hickups are really just ploys for media hype.

You make it sound like Amazon is put through the ringer for estimates like "2-3 weeks" or even "when more are available.". They aren't.

I think the most people are not upset they sold out, but upset that: a) Many of them did put in the effort to get up (or stay up) and get there in time, and had to suffer checkout issues. b) There is no Plan B, nor any other information coming out of Google. They are forced to go round the merry-go-round of refreshing the Play Store and waiting and waiting to see something change.

Most people just want to say "I want this, take my money when you can" and forget about it. It shouldn't take so much effort to give a company your money.

I completely agree, but is it possible that Google and/or LG have contracts with their partners that they may not create obligations to more than a certain amount of product at one time? Might these products sell out because, contractually, they cannot sell beyond a certain deficit of materials?

I still don't understand why they don't take pre-orders. Even if it's just a "pledge" and not a transfer of money it would serve the double purpose of demand-sizing and wait-listing.

On a small scale that could work, but I don't think it would work well at something like consumer smartphones. They could look "bad" twice: 1) if they don't get enough pledges and 2) not being able to fulfill pledges because of too much demand.

What are you talking about ? Apple allowed pre-orders for the iPhone.

There are laws in the US which require you to ship a product within a certain time or offer a refund. I agree that the 'sold out' buzz is a popular marketing technique, its one of the persuasion tools that works well, scarcity, but I think that is a side effect here.

So take a moment and imagine you are in the product manager's shoes at Google and you're tasked with forecasting how many Nexus 4's will be needed. If you guess 'high' you end up with HP's Touchpad fiasco, or Motorola's Xoom, too much product. Since you've probably borrowed the money to buy the parts to build the stuff and you have to pay it in 90 days, you need to get stuff, sell it, and then get the money to pay off the money you borrowed.

Building a million phones like this probably costs in the neighborhood of $200M - $250M. That is a pretty sizable chunk of cash to be hanging out there 'in the float' as it were. Sloshing around that much capital is like driving a fully loaded big rig truck on a wet highway, you don't want to enter any turn with too much speed, the 'bad' outcome is really bad.

So of the two options, "leaving money on the table" because someone who wanted to buy your gear couldn't, and "missing your wall street guidance" because you're carrying inventory for longer than you wanted, the former is the much better choice. At the limit its horrible but if you're going to err, and your error bars are large, you want to err on the negative side not the positive side. On the negative side you just don't make as much money as you might have wanted to, on the positive side you don't make the margins you need to make on the product.

Xoom and Touchpad were 'new' products (new to that brand) - Nexus isn't 'new' by any stretch. It's got a track record. They have customers they can survey. Hell, it's google - if they can't predict public and customer sentiment and willingness to buy, who can?

I was there for the first Nexus launch, that kind of experience can make you a bit more conservative. :-)

But now they have a lot of people bitching about how the phone doesn't have LTE so it's not like it was known it'd be a total slam dunk. I'm a T-Mobile customer in the US though so i don't worry about stuff like that. ;)

I'm more worried about the fact that they only have up to 16GB storage, for an Android phone that doesn't support removable storage.

I mean, even the iPhone 4 has 32GB!

What do you use all that space for on a phone? My Android phone (HTC Evo 4G) has 512MB internal storage and the Android version it runs doesn't support moving most apps and their data to an SD card. I still have all the apps I want. I still listen to my entire multi-gigabyte music collection... by streaming it through Amazon MP3 for free. Everything's streaming or in the cloud these days. You don't need to carry duplicate copies in your pocket.

I ordered a Nexus 4 8GB.

The problem with cloud access is that you need to have a reliable Internet connection to benefit from it.

I live in a 3rd-world country where 3G connections are either expensive or unreliable. Also, we don't have access to all the excellent streaming sites like Spotify or Hulu.

So yes, I need all that space for my music collection :)

Where do you live? For those of us that travel underground to and from work every day (i.e., the subway) having music accessible offline is pretty essential.

> What do you use all that space for on a phone

You'd be surprised. Many games, these days, can take up to 1GB for program and data files. My iPhone 4 with 16GB was so maxed out, it'd often refuse to upgrade more than one app at a time because of insufficient space.

I am somewhat obsessed with music, and these days, 16 gigabytes isn't really that much. Yes, you can stream it with spotify and google play, but that always fails when you least want it to. I wouldn't buy a phone these days with less than 64 gigabytes.

I realize I'm also somewhat unusual in this respect.

An iPhone has 32GB. But I strongly suspect that the 16GB option is more popular.

The 16GB is the cheapest option for a very fashionable phone. So no doubt it's popular. My wife has the 16 and I have the 32, figuring we'd never max out the memory in either case. Boy, were we wrong. She can't update more than a few apps at a time. I'm down to the last few GBs and even after purging videos and photos. Music isn't even a problem because we have iTunes Match so it purges things regularly.

The size of the retina apps is just insane. I compiled my first app (a small music app) around the time the 3GS came out and it was only 1MB. Now, even a simple game clocks in at 30MB.

Are you referring to the FTC 30-day / 50 day rule regarding mail/telephone orders?

http://bit.ly/PSuzVo

Yup.

It's a false dichotomy that you present. Let me preorder the phone. You have the money up front, and have an absolute lower bound on opening day stock.

The fact of the matter is that if the Nexus 4 sold out in less than an hour, then they must not have even had stock to sell to the people that signed up for "notification".

Sadly I can't sell you a binding pre-order contract. (That would be where you couldn't cancel your order) And for things like the Nexus 4 (where you might engage in a bit of reselling) you will have people 'pre-order' to get a place in line, only to find when they start shipping that you can't sell them for much of a markup on ebay so they cancel their pre-order. Or like the great disk drive crisis of 2011 where people put multiple orders into multiple distributors only to cancel when one of them filled.

Another thing to consider (and this was true of the Nexus 4 and later updated in the article) the article said they 'sold out' but Google didn't. The authors interpreted not being able to get to a sales page as being 'sold out' but later discovered that there was some order rate management going on where the 'overflow' went to the 'coming soon' page and repeated attempts would eventually get you a page you could order from.

Logistics management is a tricky thing, if you are good at it you can pretty much name your own salary because its trivially easy to 'show' how much you are worth with basic accounting techniques. If the company has the volume you can literally say "If you hire me I'll save you $700,000 a year, I'll actually save you $1,000,000 a year but I'm going to keep $300,000 of it as salary."

How does this work with preorders? Seems like that might be a way around it (unless all big-company preorders fit within this window, and smaller ones don't care, and I've never noticed).

> I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. Problem solved.

This is open to abuse; if something's that heavily in demand, fake buyers will put their names down en masse and then resell them elsewhere and make a profit while honest consumers lose out.

And they can't do that with the limited-stock/item-sold-out system?

Computers may be able to automate the task of charging for a product but they can't automate away the realities of manufacturing, especially if the initial demand was beyond Google's predictions or supply chain.

Even right now I bet Google is scrambling to find enough chip vendors for another production run of the phones as well as trying to scramble up the transportation and labor for putting them together.

Im sure the PR machines are involved too. "iPhone sells out" always hits the headlines (online and otherwise) in a big way, stoking demand (if it's sold out it must be good - and if I get one faster than everyone else I'll be able to show it off)

Put it this way - I'm sure it won't remain "sold out" (inaccessible to purchase) for long...

Yes, I don't believe there are physically no more Nexus 4's left to be sold.

It's a PR/Marketing ploy, a good one and if I was in Google's shoes it's exactly what I would be doing too.

Anyone who thinks this is Google's coders not able to take a credit card and put you on a wait-list isn't thinking outside the box.

I wish the media instead started spinning the notion of selling out as negative. This headline could have also read "Google fails to forecast demand for Nexus 4. Runs out of stock"

Yeah. I'm not sure they'd ever go that far. After all, it's always better to be understocked than overstocked. Sold out after 24 to 48 hours may represent unprecedented demand. After 50 minutes it's kind of mindless marketing manipulation.

At many stores you can. "Sorry, that's not in stock right now, but we can order it for you".

Especially bookstores, what few record stores still exist, some clothing stores, hardware stores, and more.

This is actually my preferred form of shopping. I don't care for online purchases generally, shipping and returns are a hassle (you have to be there for it, there's always the question of refunds getting properly processed, and there is simply no online presentation which is as comprehensive as having the product in your hands to assess its qualities).

For electronics, which are readily produced, it's a real sham if you aren't able to do this.

Well, it is actually almost 2013 :P

On a serious note, I think this is more of a marketing gimmick than a tech issue. Also like having very limited quantities and proclaiming "we're sold out". Not saying that is the case here though.

I think so too. AFAIK Google's computing infrastructure is such that if performance issues arise on anything critical enough they just can shove more and more servers and bandwidth into the mix and expand capacity elastically

Plus it's amazing marketing to be "selling out" of your product.

Yep... and HN loves Google Buzz. Oh wait.

I bought my iPhone through AT&T this way. It took a month to show up. There are usually avenues to do this, but people apparently would rather gamble on a phone today than have a sure thing in a month.

It sold out way quicker than that. I tried to purchase it right away, had a phone in my cart, then when I went to checkout, it was gone and said Coming Soon. This was within the first 10 minutes of the phone going on sale.

UPDATE: The store is back up. 16gb appear to be sold out, but I just successfully purchased an 8gb model.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I just bought the 16gb model successfully as well. Both orders show as pending in my Google Wallet account.

I had a similar experience. I was refreshing the page at 8:30-8:40 and when it finally gave me "add to cart" I spent about 10-15 minutes trying to get through until finally got sent back to "coming soon". It was very fast.

I understand possibly wanting marketing hype from selling out quickly, but the cryptic error messages and lack of performance on the server (from arguably the biggest internet company in the world) was disappointing.

The Google Play store is completely down now.

I've got a script checking the site, and it's been back to "Add to Cart" a couple times since it was initially down, though I've never been able to buy it. I have a suspicion that Google hasn't sold out, but the site is just melting, so they are only allowing purchases periodically.

"I've got a script checking the site...but the site is just melting", apparently without a trace of irony

Same here- I used the Page Monitor chrome add on, worked really well, ended up picking up a 8GB while the site was being hammered yesterday.

Update at 10:30 AM PST -

16gb model said 'In Stock', I added to cart and the message says 'There was a problem with your order' with a big blue button saying 'GO SHOPPING!'

I would expect better E-Commerce management from Google, who claims to have the brightest people working for it.

Update at 11:30 PST -

Bought the 16GB successsfully. Took 2 mins. I believe the 'Sold Out' news in the morning drove more customers curiously to the Google Play website, thus letting them buy it today even if they wanted to wait. No one wants a supply issue like the iPhone 5. As I thought, Google is way smarter than Apple to be prepared for high volume sales on it's platform.

Well played, Google.

I suspected it has more to do with duplicate orders getting canceled. I was able to snag one as well about 30 minutes ago.

Oh some sort of rate limiting on Wallet being enacted at the Play end. If you stop people putting the thing in the cart, they can't get to Wallet and have it choke and die, as it did this morning.

I don't think this was well played by Google or intentional at all. The Google Play website is still down. Tarnishing your brand in front of current and potential customers just to try out a guerrilla marketing tactic is just plain stupid.

A much better tactic would be to have a site that's up, responsive and presents a simple, joyful order process. That would win evangelists. People could point to the Nexus 4 launch and say, "Look everybody! When Google launches a phone, they do it right. It was a painless, awesome experience."

That is the complete opposite of the Nexus 4 launch we experienced today. Google bungled it big time (and I say that both as a consumer as well as an owner of Google stock).

When people hear about the struggle to get one of these phones they get curious. I clicked like crazy to and luckily bought two phones... I have to say I look now a bit more forward to them because they took effort to get. This kind of stuff works for most human minds.

> As I thought, Google is way smarter than Apple to be prepared for high volume sales on it's platform.

Haha. You have to laugh at how ridiculous this comment is.

There are 8600 likes on google+ for the Nexus 4. If you are very generous you could say that would translate to 860,000 purchases.

No decent smartphone manufacture plans for sales of less than 1 million units of its flagship product.

The fact that the nexus 4 sold out in every country it was sold within one hour would only demonstrate complete operational incompetence on every level to be that far off the mark.

It's a stunt and I don't like it when companies treat people like retards.

This is all a setup and im pissed because I wanted one.

Now I have to wait and play the stupid F5 game.

It does feel that Google celebrates what I feel is actually incompetence.

We don't know how many units were shipped. We don't know if Google is celebrating this or if they knew this would happen. It is possible that LG has supply chain issues and they can not crank out phones to meet demand.

Predicting market demand is Google's entire business model.

You don't know that it was a stunt. It is possible they sold many phones. I really doubt that 8600 likes translates to sales numbers. There is no way of knowing if Google sold 500 or 2 million phones before it ran out of stock. It is also possible that LG does not have the production capacity meet demand. It would be a marketing stunt if Google is intentionally creating a supply shortage, but I doubt that is Google game. Then again, we won't know until Google releases a statement about how Nexus 4s have been sold.

Translating "like" numbers to sales figures makes absolutely zero sense.

That was a Google+ Number not a Face Book Number.

Yes if you are Google and you keep track of all of these things you can quite accurately translate those metrics into potential sales.

Especially when you can build Plus Ones profiles for every phone every made then correlate that to actual sales figures. It's not 100% accurate but it's certainly accurate enough not to go out of stock in 1 hour.

Its Google entire business model last time I checked.

>There are 8600 likes on google+ for the Nexus 4. If you are very generous you could say that would translate to 860,000 purchases.

Are you serious ? Tell me you're not this stupid.

>There are 8600 likes on google+ .. translate to 860,000 purchases.

If this wasn't HN I'd just post "LOL."

But, seriously? There might be just a little bias between heavy users of Google+ and people who would "like" the Nexus 4.

I'd say it's more likely that would translate to <8600 purchases, than 860k.

Annoyed that they never sent out the email notifying that it went on sale despite having signed up for that.

The cynical side of me thinks that they're out of stock, it shows that they didn't believe their own statements about how great the product is and so didn't secure adequate supply. It makes me question just how much they believed in the product.

I suppose it's possible that the current order limits are based on how many orders they're able to handle versus physical supply, but I remain skeptical.

I downloaded the Auto Refresh Plus Chrome plugin, set it to auto-refresh the 16GB page (https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_16g...) every 1s and set the "Popup notification once FIND the target" option using the word "STOCK".

I went through 3-4 false starts of trying to add it to cart and having it fail, but it eventually succeeded and I was able to add to cart and complete the purchase at 3:04pm EST.

That worked for me too :). Thanks for the tip.

This tip also worked for me. Snagged a 16GB long after I thought hope was lost. Thanks for sharing :)

Thanks for the comment. I managed to snag a 16GB at 6:08 EST and I'm crossing my fingers that the order doesn't get lost.

Just a heads up, it's not sold out, I got mine just now which is 3 hours after people are saying it's sold out. The sales keep going up and down I'm not sure if it's due to server issues or they are adding more stock here and there as they get them but you can still get one if you try.

Just like in every other country that has launched it...

It would make it so much less painful if they atleast give me the option to pre-order the next batch so i don't have to recheck all my info-sources all the time...

Yea, I agree. I was planning get one but didn't get a chance. Even if we can't pre-order, it would be great if they release some info about when the next batch will be available.

Has anyone else noticed that when you repeatedly click between the two different models in the play store, the seems to change randomly from "Coming Soon" to "Out of Stock"?

As much as I want to like Android, this is the type of experience that just makes me want to head straight back to Apple. If Google can't even get their their flagship product's launch day store working properly, do I really want to trust their customer service if I break my phone, or their ability to manage an entire mobile ecosystem?

After owning early Android devices and being incredibly disappointed at the experience (crashes, incompatibilities, lack of software, poor battery life, lack of promised updates) I swore off getting another Android device for a long time.

In the meantime I've owned apple products, and always been extremely happy with the overall experience. With the Nexus 4 announcement, I've decided to give Android another shot. As I said earlier I really want to like Android, but it's stuff like this that makes me have second thoughts, and reconsider just getting an iphone 5.

In my opinion this is a huge failure on Google's part.

It would be nice if Google would release some sales numbers on this. I'd imagine it would sell well in Europe where the lack of LTE is not an issue. I don't see it selling that well in the US, most people here get new phones every two years when their contracts are up at subsidized pricing.

In Canada contracts are still typically three years. I've been salivating over this for months.

I am almost done my three year contract with Bell. I don't mind them so I don't mind staying with them. I want the N4 and I talked to retentions about what I could get post-plan if I brought in my own phone. They seemed quite confused and couldn't give me any better deals than a new customer. If I had gotten one of their subsidized phoned on a new 3-year deal they would have been able to give me a better deal. I would even be willing to go on a 1-2 year deal with an N4 but alas they seem like they don't know how to deal with this situation.

I could just go with the Samsung Galaxy SIII which wouldn't be a bad phone but it wouldn't be carrying the vanilla Android but rather Bell's variant (which I am not sure how bad it is).

I've looked at other carriers, Koodo, Fido, Wind and Moblicity. Either their deals aren't any better than I have now or they have little coverage. Wind is much better than Moblicity in coverage so I am not sure how much roaming with them would cost me on average a month.

So I am not sure which way I should go with my new phone.

The Canadian carriers don't seem very interested in doing favorable deals for bring-your-own-phone customers.

Either it's still too small a segment or (perhaps more likely) they've figured out they can lock people in to more 3 year contracts if there's no difference in the month-to-month prices.

I've seen Bell occasionally do promos where you can take $5/$10 off any plan if you have your own phone, but not much besides that.

I'd be very happy to be told I was wrong and there was a way to get better pricing, BTW. :)

See my (brother?) comment, this phone will work on an AWS carrier like Wind or Mobilicity, and their plans are between 50% and 75% of RoBelus

If you live in a covered area Mobilicity is awesome. I'm in Ottawa, and it's going to be $25 a month for text/talk/data (what Telus currently charges me $60 for). Even if you consider the amount of subsidy they provide, the price differential is so wide. They also recently added free roaming minutes every month (50 minutes), for when I visit my family.

I can't speak to Ottawa but in Toronto Mobilicity coverage in the areas they claim are covered is pretty awful.

Rogers charges you through the nose but I get LTE coverage almost everywhere and 3G coverage everywhere, while my Mobility friends have no data connection to speak of when in most buildings.

It sold well enough in the US to bring Google's Play Store to its knees.

I would still like to see some sales data. While I wouldn't expect Google to do anything like this, there exists the possibility that a company could create the appearance of a massive sales by limited the supply and slowing their servers, effectively making people think the phone sold out in massive enough numbers to bring down their services. Artificial supply constraints is a well known and commonly used tactic to increase demand.

Again, I wouldn't say Google would go to these levels of showmanship just to sell a phone, but seeing actual sales data in front of you shows more pieces of the truth than not having the data.

Not only that but I'd like more companies to do the same thing Apple has done with stating units actually put into customer hands versus send off to sales channels/etc...

Would make it easier to guage/compare sales amongst the companies.

Why lack of LTE is not an issue in Europe? Is the coverage in Europe smaller then in the US? In Poland 35% population is covered with LTE, so I would assume rest of the Europe has at least that.

LTE is very new and data plans are usually terrible in a lot of European countries.

Some readers, like Henk van Ess are reporting that they’re still able to snag them. He used Chrome to make his purchase as other browsers wouldn’t allow him to complete the transaction.

This is sad.

The whole launch seems very poorly thought out. Or am I missing the genius of it?

* no official launch time.

* no early email notifications went out.

* no sense of stock availability.

* high phone limit (5) per user.

* constant site errors.

* constant checkout errors.

* HSPA+ feature typo.

How many were sold? I can't (easily) find numbers on what the available stock was.

This means that the price of the Nexus 4 isn't $299. It's actually about $490, the current buy-it-now price on ebay.

That's the price the eBay sharks are selling at. It's not the official price.

If people are willing to pay that, it's the market price.

No, this is price discrimination. There are _some_ people willing to pay more to have it.

It doesn't represent that the aggregate demand is at this price.

It may not be the optimal point on the supply-demand curve, but if supply is limited, then the price is whatever people are willing to pay.

Do we have any evidence that people are actually paying that price?

As always the price of a thing is what the market is willing to bear, not the sticker on the box.

You can't use the Buy-it-now price, since that's the I-wish price.

Check auction prices.

I just looked at the sold listings. The Nexus 4 looks like it's going for $460-499.

Ok, as of 12:09pm CST, I was able to add a 16GB N4 to my cart and check-out.

So either they found another pallette of the things somewhere, or people are getting cold feet and canceling their orders.

Hitting F5 on the product page seems to find a phone about once every twenty times, and on about the 1/5th try to add to cart, it succeeded.

A lot of people ended up with duplicate orders from the madness this morning, and I expect they're cancelling. My co-worker ended up with 3 N4's despite only seeing one confirmation.

It's been a while since I've been so stoked about a piece of tech!

I returned my Galaxy Nexus, mainly for the poor camera, and for the fact that not one week after getting it, it was discontinued and replaced with this much nicer phone.

This joker is selling his nexus 4 for £1200 ($1900) in the UK

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/lg-GOOGLE-NEXUS-4-8GB-UNLOCKED-BRA...

I'm pretty sure selling something you don't actually have isn't allowed on ebay (he's selling a phone he hasn't received, and in all likelyhood wont receive as google could quite easily cancel the other 2 orders as they seem to be a mistake).

The bid is now at £2050 ($3280), mind you they are all from accounts with 0 history. Only one bidder has a history and its at 40.

Its /kind of/ sold out - if you refresh enough it will allow you to add it to your cart. I took me about 30 minutes of refreshing, and about 15 failed attempts to add it to my cart, but I finally was able to check out successfully with a 16GB Nexus 4.

Order date: Nov 13, 2012 1:36:11 PM EST

I stayed up till after midnight and then got up again at 9pm to try and place an order. I guess I wasn't persistent enough at the face of errors - no phone.

Google should do much better at communicating the situation. When will the phone be available for ordering, how many units are in stock, etc. How about providing some information about when the next batch is coming? The way they've handled this is a disgrace. If there was any comparable product in a comparable price I would not be buying Google.

EDIT: Are all those people saying that if you keep refreshing you'll get to buy it just part of a DDoS attack on the store?

I hope the phone works better than the store. :-(

Google - I am sure you lost some sales by releasing the 4.2 update for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 on the same day as Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 were released! Not that I am complaining - this same day update is fast even for Google :)

They'd lose even more sales by holding the update back for any significant amount of time. ~Day-0 updates are effectively part of the Nexus brand.

>Day-0 updates are effectively part of the Nexus brand

For current Nexus devices may be - but for older gen Nexus devices I am not sure I have ever seen a same day update.

I've got a Nexus S 4G, I'm lucky if I see an update within months of release.

You can always download android and build/flash it yourself. The Nexus S 4g has downloads for binary drivers through Android 4.1.2, the rest is the regular source download.

I'm fairly well-versed regarding ROMs, and actually ran CM and MIUI on it for quite a while with decent results, but that's not really the point. Nexus is supposed to mean "first in line for OTA updates", not "wait for us to put it on AOSP and then build and flash it yourself, or wait for a modder to make a decent ROM".

That is absolutely not the brand I thought I was buying.

Edit: Sorry, that was a ruder tone than I intended. I've got a bit of a love/hate relationship with my Nexus S due to the OTA frustrations, but I do love that Android has the option for taking matters into my own hands.

I had similar OTA frustrations with my Galaxy Nexus. Apparently I got an Australian carrier crippled build :(

After flashing yakju once, all the updates flow smoothly.

The tone's fine, it's not a great response to your frustrations. Carriers and phone vendors see additional support costs for no benefit. At the very least, Nexus does mean that you can get everything you need to build an image from Google directly.

Nexus S will not be getting 4.2 apparently: http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/11/13/android-4-2-being-pushed-t...

I was initially upset about this, but I have to admit the Nexus S is fairly behind what most would consider modern smartphone hardware to be. Single core CPU, no GPU, barely any RAM to speak of, it's no surprise that Android has progressed to the point where it simply could not run well on such a device. Besides that, there is documentation available (though not widely advertised) that states that Nexus devices have an 18 month support lifecycle and the Nexus S hit that back in July.

I'll just have to accept my fate, and pick up a Nexus 4 when I'm able.

I have an unlocked Galaxy Nexus and I don't see any system updates in settings. Do you have any sources for this?

See: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1419170

The OTA was released this morning (I've flashed my unlocked Galaxy Nexus to 4.2).

Prerequisite: Nexus 7 with Android 4.1.2 build JZO54K

Manual download link: http://android.clients.google.com/packages/data/ota/google_n...

Instructions: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/13/android-4-2-build-jo...

Just follow this - http://www.androidcentral.com/gsm-galaxy-nexus-android-42-up.... AC tools link has adb for Win/Mac/Linux and that is all you will need in addition to the update zip.

Like some people have mentioned, I don't think that the N4 is actually sold out. I think they're just making small batches available slowly as to not instantiate a big performance issue on their servers. Keep refreshing the page every so often and click 'Add to Cart' once you see that button. F5'ing the page and then clicking that small gap in between the 'Email' box and the 'Notify Me' button after each time you press F5 will increase the likelihood of pre-empting someone else's click (since the Add to Cart button will be located there).

I just got a 16GB model after hitting refresh on and off for the past hour

Thanks for the tip - this worked for me as well, although I felt kind of dirty doing it (the poor servers!).

Same here. Requires lots of patience.

Pretty happy with the prospect of unlocked phones becoming a market norm. I've been very happy with my Nexuses in the past: super convenient to be able to just throw in a new SIM when I'm travelling.

The Google store was extremely slow during this period. I tried to initiate a purchase around 5 minutes after they became available, but 95% of my clicks resulted in errors, and when it finally went through, the Wallet info collector hung for another 5 minutes. When that finally went through, my cart had had the phone removed from it, and they were once again out of stock.

So the 50 minutes is probably somewhat inflated. Had the store kept pace it probably would've been more like 10 minutes.

This is surprising. Not that it sold out after 10 minutes, but that Google didn't handle the load well.

I wonder why - surely they expected this (if nothing else, given the performance of the phone in other markets).

This happens every time google sells something directly, just like Google I/O tickets for the last few years.

I had the same experience. The 16 GB went first, then the 8GB about 20 - 30 minutes afterwards.

I expect LG will be able to make more, but this is a standout phone.

In my case, my Nexus 7 basically opened the horizon up for me, as far as moving from my iPhone 4S. The fact that T-Mobile hasn't yet marshalled many towers to support 3G on the iPhone 4/4S makes the switch to a pentaband phone a real plus as far as utility is concerned. Edge works, just, but really sucks every day.

Same thing happened to me, except when Wallet hung it apparently processed my order. I'm glad I checked twice since I had two orders (Nexus 10, not Nexus 4 - Had no chance of getting that guy).

Had the same issue with the same device. I received a notification from my credit card vendor for a large purchase for the first one, but wallet service hung up and wasn't even waiting for a response anymore, and the items weren't removed my cart so I made a second purchase, which showed up immediately in my orders. Half hour later I received two receipts, and a second showed up in my orders screen.

So, heads up if anyone made a similar mistake :) It's easy enough to cancel the order if you need to.

Luckily, I got my order through albeit with a good share of issues.

-> Google Wallet pane opening empty

-> Google Wallet pane opening with an error message

-> Google Wallet pane not opening and me receiving a top of the window notification saying they are working hard on resolving the issue

-> Google wallet opening, with info. I then clicked purchase and it wouldnt go through.

After multiple times trying it, losing my cart a few times, I got a N4 8GB order through. Should ship in two days.

I wasn't that lucky. But I've grabbed some screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/SikfG

I especially like the "Expected 3 components in jwt:" one :)

So they successfully replicated the online apple store rush experience then?

What's incredible is that the Nexus 4 is so successful that LG won't make it available in Belgium or the Netherlands[1].

So they clearly think they can sell all of their stock for the foreseeable future in just a few countries.

[1] http://tweakers.net/nieuws/85507/lg-brengt-nexus-4-niet-uit-... (in dutch)

1922: heroin

1932: alchohol

1942: nicotine

1952: amphetamines

1962: marijuana

1972: acid

1982: crack cocaine

1992: crystal meth

2002: X

2012: smartphones

So now capitalism itself is the opium of the people?

Why are smartphones capitalism and not drugs. If anything drugs prove the workings of makets better then smartphones. The drugs market shows that markets work even in a state of anarchy.

Given my fascination with things dopamineagenic and their interplay in modern consumer commerce, that is a very insightful observation.

Note that Marx's version is usually given as "the opiate of the masses", but still.

Not really that insightful... [0]

[0]http://www.wbenjamin.org/passageways.html

You should throw HN somewhere on there as well. ;)

2002: Internet? :)

I think he was referring to MDMA when he said "X"

Ah, makes sense.

You forgot 'Tickle me Elmo' back in 2008.

tickle me elmo was a craze in 1996

And Tickle me Elmo on fire was 2006. youtube.com/watch?v=xLaHpl7CmRU

It's not strictly sold out.

At 3:03 PM EST, I managed to purchase a 16GB Nexus 4 after refreshing every second for ten minutes.

What grinds my gears is that I had it in the cart and processing 4 times and still didn't get it. I find out 2 hours later people were still currently buying it even after it kept showing me the "notify me" button. Oh well I guess I'll wait even longer.

So if I'm on Verizon and I buy this, what speeds should I expect? I'd be ok with HSPA+ speeds (I find Verizon LTE to be extremely underwhelming), but as I understand it, Verizon doesn't do HSPA+. What will the Nexus 4 fall back to?

I'm sticking to galaxy nexus until this persons question is answered.

>So if I'm on Verizon and I buy this, what speeds should I expect?

It won't operate on Verizon's network. GSM only.

This phone will not work on Verizon or Sprint.

Wow...so to insure working across all carriers, they cut out two very large carriers? This doesn't make sense to me.

Uh.. they didn't 'cut out' anything. If anything, it's the carriers that are stupid for not adopting the same standard of using sim cards (Verizon and Sprint don't use sim cards..). I think they wanted to lock people in to their service.

I don't disagree...I've found the lack of GSM support on Verizon frustrating over the years. Unfortunately, Verizon effectively kills the competition for us in terms of coverage and price at a corporate level.

It's more than "adopting" sim cards. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA networks, and incompatible at the very root with GSM networks like T-Mo and AT&T.

The phone is GSM based, Verizon and Sprint use CDMA. If the market for the phone was just the US, making it GSM only may not be a great choice. However, outside of the US, the rest of the world is almost exclusively GSM.

Nexus 4 looks like a great phone - very comparable to the Galaxy S III. Since the fair price of a new or virtually new S3 on eBay is about $450, the Nexus 4 at $299 new is a steal if you don't need a microSD slot.

Just one data point but I had zero problems. Refreshed the page and saw "add to cart." Went to checkout, entered my info, and clicked purchase. Guess I just got lucky.

If they don't make any mention of inventory on hand for the launch then what is the point? Who cares how fast something sells out if it's not put into context.

I care, as someone who wanted to buy one.

You know, had they implemented a pre-order option, they may have been able to better gauge demand. Instead, they decided to piss off their customers.

Got a 16GB at 1:10pm CST by refreshing the page every 2 seconds and stopping when "Notify" was replaced with "Add to Cart". Sorry Google.

Just sold out in Canada as well. Bummer.

That's odd. I wasn't notified by email when it apparently became available. Were people just refreshing Google Play nonstop until they saw an option to buy it?

Yes. yes we were.

Anybody have any more luck in canada?

Just ordered a N4 16 GB, it seems they're still letting some stock out today for the US. 4:34 pm CDT.

Anyone have any guess when it will be available again, based on past "day 1 sellouts" like this?

Did it!

After refreshing repeatedly, I finally got through and made a purchase for the 8GB at around noon PST.

I just managed to get a Nexus 4. Just refresh the page and you might be the lucky one.

out of curiosity (not obsessed), does the losing page say "Sold Out" in red letters like mine does?

I think you're out of luck now. It was saying "Coming Soon" until under an hour ago, and that's when people were still picking them up here and there by refreshing all day, myself included. Since it just recently changed to "Sold Out", it's probably actually sold out now.

The Google Play Store page kept switching between "Sold Out" and "Coming Soon." I didn't try it obsessively but i tried it once in a while throughout the day. And it worked.

I just placed an order for the 16GB model. I don't believe it's sold out.

http://i.imgur.com/otNAV.jpg

I seem to be saying this a lot lately: How is this HN related?

They just came back in stock, I managed to snag one quickly.

This is almost like the touchpad fiasco all over again

would this be an indicator for any future trends in contract subsidized phones vs others?

It may be an indicator that the iPhone lifetime is now exceeding 2 years, and rather than being desperate to get the next Apple iDevice, people are instead casting around for cheaper cell-plans and thinking about moving to Android.

This just happen to be how the latest Android toy is sold. And probably has little to do with the cost of data plan or subsidy in general.

You're extrapolating all that from a phone that is manufactured in small quantities and subsidized to the point that it's basically an off-contract phone for an on-contract price selling out?

I don't want or need the thing and I'm thinking about buying it. It undercuts every high end off contract Android phone on the market by about $100-200 while also boasting a much better design and spec sheet.

This is basically a fire-sale at launch. It sold out because it's decent and market-disruptingly (some would argue dangerously) cheap.

It felt more like 15 minutes.

is that 360 degree camera feature software or hardware or both?

Software which requires hardware to support Android 4.2

I'd love to see numbers to compare this to the sale of previous iPhones. My gut instinct says this is a supply-side issue more than a popularity issue. Could google be keeping supply low to keep demand up? Or was this such a popular product (people reporting that this bringing the google store to its knees) that it sold out within minutes and google was just ill prepared for the popularity?

My gut feel is the opposite. This is a ridiculous phone, for a ridiculous price. I personally wanted it and couldn't get it Today yet, and I know of at least 5 other people (outside the US) who've been pinging me to see if it's going to be available anytime soon. Pretty sure it's a demand-issue this time.

If the numbers are good, they'll brag about them. If they don't, it's a pretty good sign that it's supply.

If this is Apple that'd be true, but since when has Google really bragged about any sales numbers?

Given it's 50 minutes, the numbers don't have to be incredibl good to make a really impressive-sounding rate.

Let's say they had a quarter million units for sale for their first run (given their Nex7 sales, totally reasonable). That means they're selling ~80 phones a second.

Now did Apple sell more? Sure. Does that mean these numbers are bad, even in a relative sense given the obscurity of the Nexus brand, the troubles during launch and the location of sale?

No. Supply or Demand, this is good for Nexus.

The Nexus phones typically haven't been all that popular, so it wouldn't surprise me if supply was low. That would have been more because of expected low demand than marketing. Perhaps they were aiming to sell out on low demand, and got more than they bargained for.

The iPhone 5 sold five million in the first three days. The phone was announced Sep-12, preorders opened Sep-14, sales opened Sep-21. If you look at the estimated BOM+manufacturing cost ($207) that means Apple probably had a billion dollars worth of iPhones sitting in their distribution network before they even started selling them.

Does Google have five million of these phones sitting in a warehouse? I doubt it, they probably manufactured based on historical Nexus sales figures, and I'd guess that the fact that this is sold out just means it is selling better than previous Nexus phones.

EDIT: I can't find a good source but my best estimate for the sales of the Galaxy Nexus (i.e. Nexus 3) is 100,000 per month based on sales of $250M over 6 months at $400 ea. [1]

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/20/3256590/samsung-galaxy-nex...

The fact that Google Play slowed to a crawl once orders opened in every single country tells me that they must have had a good amount of sales right? Even if they did have a small stock of devices this tells me that there is a high demand for the Nexus 4.

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