Apple won’t release its first-weekend iPhone 7 sales — and that’s kind of a bummer

Apple is known for playing things close to the vest, except when it has big sales numbers to tout.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that the company has said it won’t release the first weekend of sales information on the iPhone 7 that was introduced Wednesday.

For its part, Apple says it will certainly sell out and that the numbers are more a reflection of the supply of iPhones it has managed to manufacture than consumer demand.

Even if that’s true, it was still one of the few solid metrics of how well the phone was doing. (And the absence of numbers can also be telling. Apple, for example, has never said how many Apple Watches it has sold.)

As a reminder, pre-sales for the iPhone start Friday, with the first phones being made available a week later.

Apple's stock took a dip this morning, down more than 2 percent, after it announced it wouldn't release sales figures.

Here’s Apple’s full statement:

We expect iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be incredibly popular with customers and we are thrilled to begin taking pre-orders on September 9. Customers will receive their new iPhones starting September 16.

In years past, we’ve announced how many new iPhones had been sold as of the first weekend following launch.

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 pre-order 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. 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.

iPhone 7 Lineup and Pricing

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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