It was pos­si­ble to walk in­to stores in the US last week­end and buy an iPhone 5, but it took some hunt­ing. Some stores re­port­ed hav­ing Ap­ple's newest phone avail­able for walk-up cus­tomers, though not all ver­sions of it. A ran­dom check of about a dozen stores in­di­cat­ed that most were sold out.

A Ver­i­zon store in New York City said the 32 and 64 gi­ga­byte mod­els, but not the 16 GB ver­sion, were avail­able. A Sprint store in a sub­urb of St Paul, Min­neso­ta, said all but the most ex­pen­sive 64 GB iPhone 5s were sold out. "Be­fore we were even sched­uled to open, we were pret­ty much out," said Er­ic Ray­burn, a work­er at a Sprint store in Phoenix.

The iPhone 5 went on sale Fri­day, ig­nit­ing in­tense in­ter­est around the world. Ap­ple's Web site said phones bought on­line would ship in three to four weeks. Ver­i­zon's Web site said they would ship by Oc­to­ber 19. It's hard­ly un­com­mon for sup­ply short­ages to make it dif­fi­cult to get new iPhones in the first days af­ter their re­lease. For Ap­ple, the iPhone in­tro­duc­tion is the biggest rev­enue dri­ver of the year.