It's the moment Apple fans in India have been counting down to for months. At the stroke of midnight on Friday, October 17, several electronics retail stores across the country opened their shutters to people eagerly waiting to buy the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus.
Many of these stores, including Maple, Vijay Sales, HK Mobiles, and several others in Mumbai, accepted bookings for Apple's latest smartphones on a Rs 1,000 down payment, and handed out tokens that could be used to allot phones when stocks came in. After speaking to several store owners, it was apparent that none of the stores actually had the stock beforehand; they all expected delivery at about 11:30pm.
All images by Gwyn D'Mello
Several high-profile celebrities have expectedly booked the iPhone 6 (one of the dealers showed our reporter a text from Subhash Ghai, asking for him to be notified when the stock came in. An agent of Shah Rukh Khan was also in on the waitlist, and a Bank of India official was one of the first to unbox the new model as well).
At the Maple store in Bandra, after they opened their shutters at midnight, prospective customers made payments for their phones even while the stock was still en route.
The 16GB iPhone 6 model is priced at Rs 53,500 (comparable to the current price of the 128GB iPhone 5s). The 64GB and 128GB models cost Rs 62,500 and Rs 71,500 respectively. The iPhone 6 Plus raises the bar even higher, with the 16GB base model sitting pretty at Rs 62,500, the 64GB at Rs 71,500, and the 128GB model demolishing your pocket at a cool Rs 80,500. (To put things in perspective, a budget trip to Thailand can work out to about Rs 50,000 inclusive of airfare.)
But while the fanfare of the first unboxing was in full swing at Maple, HK Mobiles just down the road, had already unlocked that achievement a good ten minutes before. Twenty eight-year-old Abdul Samad from Bandra got his hands on the 64GB iPhone 6 at approximately 12:03, minutes after the phone stock reached various Bandra stores. Phone connoisseurs of a kind, Samad and his brother Abdul Anan have been buying the latest phones in the market for awhile now.
"Having the latest phone is just something we do. But while the iPhone 6 makes sense to me, I'd rather pick up the Galaxy Note 4 than shell out money for the iPhone 6 Plus," says Samad.
Phone dealers across Mumbai, meanwhile, are optimistic about sales, pointing out that, although expensive, the price tags on the new models are nonetheless very similar to those in the US this time around.
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