The iPhone Search Makes Me Wonder…What Does Apple Do with All of This Cash?

Tonight I really felt like I’d drank the Kool-Aid. I drove 40 minutes down to the mall, and then visited four separate stores only to find that none, NONE of them had the iPhone 5S in stock.  I know I’ve been needing a new phone since my model 4’s home button started getting a little harder to push. Not good.  Then over the weekend, I left the phone out on the deck playing music and a short shower got it a bit wet.  Ugh, that’s it, the terrible little red sign was showing inside it, and it would never boot up again.

So there I was in Best Buy, with the blue-shirt poking around in his AT&T closet, and pulling out a 5, not a 5S.  Next stop Radio Shack. A young woman was helping a few other customers and looked up to greet me.  “No, they won’t be sending any of those to this store,” she said, glumly, accepting the lowly stature of a mall-based ‘Shack.

So I walked on, to the big and quite busy Apple store.  Each of their uniformed staff was busy chatting about iPhones and the new Retina screen iPads. Every one had a short little waiting line.  I found out that they had just sold the last 5S in the store. No dice.

Then to the big AT&T store, with just a handful of customers and lots of staff. A few were looking at their phones, and then I caught a young women’s attention. “You can try back later in the week, we might have some.”

My last stop was a Best Buy Mobile store, a slim version of the big appliance stores, specializing in phones. Luck? NO!  They didn’t have any and didn’t sound likely to be getting any.

What would it be like to build a device that so many people have to have that you can’t stock the shelves fast enough?  It would be nicer if we knew that the Apple Corporation was going to fun tremendous amounts of charities and do gooding. But the company is not known for that, legend Steve Jobs refused all manner of funding charitable endeavors, not willing to do a match for employee donations, or much else.  It’s back with CEO Tim Cook, but still—what the hell do they do with all of that money from selling 9 million iPhones in just several weeks?