[the_watcher]

Isn't this data? "In Australia and China, online Apple Store shipping times for the iPhone 5s rapidly slipped to 7–10 days for all colors and capacities, with immediate unavailability of the 64GB gold version."

It's not big data in the Facebook/Twitter sense of the word, but in this case, how quickly unavailability is reached seems to be the best data point.

[mikeash]

This completely ignores the fact that the exact same thing happened in the US and probably every other 5S launch country.

That gold is preferred in Asia is not under dispute. What I dispute is the idea that it is preferred more than in other countries. I've yet to see any evidence for this, but that doesn't stop all of these articles from making the claim anyway.