iPhone 5 preorders back online at Apple

Well, that didn't last long. Earlier today, the Associated Press reported that Apple had stopped taking orders for the iPhone 5 because of a crush of demand that exhausted the initial product inventory. But the site was back in business Friday morning, the one caveat being the two-per-customer limit.

Apple's site now estimates the wait-time for delivery to be two weeks instead of the original date of September 21. When Apple opened up iPhone 5 preordering at midnight, the first batch of iPhone 5 models sold out within an hour, stretching delivery times to as long as three weeks.

Whatever the initial customer frustration, the intense early interest signals a big fall hit for Apple. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster noted an analysis of Twitter traffic by Investing Analytics, which said tweets surrounding the iPhone 5 on launch day were up 460 percent compared with tweets about the iPhone 4S when it debuted -- and 73 percent of the iPhone tweets were positive compared with 51 percent when the iPhone 4S launched.

Parsing the data, Munster reaffirmed his belief that Apple will meet his 6 million to 10 million iPhone 5 unit sales estimate for the rest of this month. He also expects Apple to sell 49 million units in the fourth quarter overall.