Gold iPhone 5s dubbed "The Kardashian Phone"

For years, companies have been making a profit by offering to customize the color of customers’ iPhones. Through a process called anodization, which involves applying an electric charge to the aluminum base that iPhone 5 models are famous for, companies like Anostyle are able to effectively dye the metal and change the color of the phone. Therefore, even before the iPhone 5S came along and offered gold as one of the possible factory standard colors for the phone, gold iPhones were becoming an increasingly popular option. Of course, their popularity was spurred on by the fact that one of the most famous people on the planet was bragging on social media about her new gold anodized iPhone. Naturally, that person was Kim Kardashian, who did so much to popularize her gold iPhone 5 variant that Apple employees actually took to calling the new gold iPhone 5S “the Kardashian phone” leading up to its release last month. “A source at Apple told me while they were making the gold iPhone it was referred to internally as ‘The Kardashian Phone,’” New York Times columnist Nick Bilton tweeted. Needless to say, the name wasn’t official, and did not make its way into promotional materials or anything. But according to an article from Tech Crunch, referring to the new gold iPhone 5S as “the Kardashian phone” actually became quite popular as an Apple office inside joke. Regardless of office jokes or celebrity references, the gold iPhone 5S model has thus far been incredibly in-demand among consumers. While all iPhone 5S models were hard to find on the day the phone hit stores, consumer demand for the gold option quickly outstripped physical supply – as well as demand for the other two color options, space gray and silver. The gold phone has remained intermittently unavailable due to limited supply or internet back orders on Apple’s site, though folks who ordered the phone on release date have mostly received it by now. The popularity for the gold phone is understandable, with or without its connection to a superstar like Kim Kardashian. Where the space gray and silver colors – ostensibly the classic black and white models that iPhones have been available in since the iPhone 4 – have been saturating the Apple device market for years, gold is a fairly new frontier for the company. Black and white devices have always done well for Apple, dating back to some of the earlier iPod classic models, and they have remained natural choices for the colorization of the iPhone. However, the unveiling of the new gold option has proven to be an “event” of sorts: buyers want a phone that looks unique, and the gold iPhone 5S certainly fits that bill. For now.