You've been saving up your pennies, eking out the last drops of use from your mobile, but today's the day: you've set October 18 as the day you buy a new iPhone 13. You head over to Apple.com, only to find... you can't buy a new Apple gadget?
That's right - Apple's online store is currently down, meaning you can't buy a new iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or other such gadget there. Luckily every single retailer under the sun is still selling the company's gadgets, so you can easily find an iPhone 13 deal without Apple's help.
Apple sells iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, TV hardware and AirPods on its website, and while you can still find the listings for them live, clicking any of the 'buy' links takes you to a page saying "be right back".
- Check out our iPhone 13 Pro Max review
- An iPhone SE 3 is expected at some point
- These are the best iPhones
Where are Ü now Apple?
Why is the Apple website down at all? No, this isn't another case of a widespread internet outage, despite the number of them happening all the time. In fact, it's a very deliberate move by Apple.
There's an Apple October event happening today, and we're expecting to see the AirPods 3, AirPods Pro 2 or a new MacBook Pro (or likely some combination of all of them and more).
You can check out our live blog for the event here, though the proceedings only properly kick off at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm BST / 4am November 11 AEST.
For all its product launches, Apple temporarily takes its store offline, so it can make adjustments to the site ready for all the new information and devices. It sometimes takes the website offline in the hour leading up to the unveiling, and sometimes hours in advance.
Sure, it could be a little annoying that Apple is stopping you buying an iPhone, when there's no chance new iPhones will be unveiled (it's been a month since the last ones came out - the company isn't that quick) but this is the way it always works.
If you can wait a few hours, the website will come back online. Alternatively, you can go to any other retailer, but if you've got a discount like the student reduction, other shops might not accept it, so you should just wait.
