Let’s play with some numbers: AT&T reported that their first-day pre-orders were over 200,000. That leaves 800,000 remaining units. Let’s just assume those remaining units were split evenly between Verizon, Sprint, and the additional countries you could order an iPhone from: the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan. That would mean each saw more than 114,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4S.
Of course the numbers didn’t actually land like that, but no matter how you slice it, it’s still a lot of pre-orders for just a 24-hour period.
If Apple had introduced a new form factor would they have been able to keep up with this demand?