Why Apple wants to keep you in the dark

The iPhone 7 will go on sale on Friday in a large number of countries, a lot more than what we’d usually see in the first iPhone launch wave. Before pre-orders even open, Apple has already revealed two things about the upcoming iPhone 7 sales.

For starters, the iPhone 7 is likely to sell out. But Apple also said you shouldn’t expect any sales records. That’s not because Apple will not top its current iPhone launch weekend sales, but because the iPhone maker will no longer tell us if that’s the case.

DON’T MISS: iPhone 7 release date announced: Preorders start Friday, release on September 16

Apple released a statement to CNBC that explains its thinking:

“We expect iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be incredibly popular with customers, and we are thrilled to begin taking preorders on September 9,” Apple said. “Customers will receive their new iPhones starting September 16.”

But Apple won’t tell us how many iPhone 7s it’ll sell. “In years past, we’ve announced how many new iPhones had been sold as of the first weekend following launch,” Apple notes. “But as we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer preorder that we will sell out of iPhone 7.”

“These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers,” Apple continued. “Therefore, we won’t be releasing a first-weekend number any longer. We are reiterating the financial guidance for the September quarter that we provided on July 26.”

That, to me, sounds like a complicated explanation for Apple’s acknowledgement that iPhone sales might not be picking up in the very near future, and that the iPhone 7 will not set a new record.