Jake Marsh As I write this, you can’t pick up an iPhone Duo at any of the 12 Apple Stores nearest New York, Dallas or San Francisco. Every one of the eight configurations says “Currently unavailable” at every store. When units do turn up, the trick is noticing before they’re gone.
Apple’s online store has a public web address for in-store pickup availability, and it answers for the dozen nearest stores and every model you ask about in a single request. That’s a perfect job for an agent: check it every 30 seconds, stay quiet, and tap you on the shoulder the moment something is really ready.
So here’s a little configurator. Pick what you want, copy the prompt, and paste it to Claude Code or any agent that can run a small script in the background.
Your agent should answer with one sentence confirming exactly what it’s watching, then go quiet until there’s something to tell you.
How It Works# #
The URL in the prompt looks like this:
location can be a city and state or a ZIP code (a city name on its own gets an error back). Apple decides what “near” means: it always returns the 12 closest stores, so near Dallas the list reaches all the way to Houston, Austin and Oklahoma City. Each parts.N is a part number, and every storage and color combination has its own: MK1G4LL/A is the 512GB Star White, MK1L4LL/A is the 1TB Night Sky, and so on. The carrier gets picked at checkout, so one part number covers all of them. The reply lists the nearest stores, and under each one, every part you asked about.
The part that matters is deciding what “available” means. Every store and part comes back with a pickupDisplay and a storeSelectionEnabled flag, and the prompt only counts it when both say yes. While testing this I asked about a few accessories near Dallas: chargers that were in stock came back available with selection enabled, and a case that can’t be picked up came back ineligible with selection turned off. Checking one field alone gets you false alarms.
The prompt also asks your agent for a few manners:
- One request per check. Every store and every configuration in one call, from a small background script, instead of a full agent turn every 30 seconds.
- Quiet until it matters. No “still nothing” updates. A failed check (an error or a reply it can’t read) is reported as a failed check, never as “out of stock.”
- Double check, then tell you. On a hit it asks once more, then sends you the store, the configuration, Apple’s own wording (like “Tomorrow at Apple Knox Street”) and the buy link.
- Alert only. It never orders, reserves or adds anything to a bag. You check out yourself.
## Or Run The Check Yourself[#](#or-run-the-check-yourself)
If you’d rather see it work first, here’s the same check as a small script. It prints one line per store that can hand you the phone, prints nothing when nobody can, and exits with 3 when the check itself fails:
Wrap it in a loop with a sleep 30 and you’ve got your own watcher. The agent version is nicer, though: it notices when something’s there, double checks, and tells you in words.
The same trick works for anything Apple sells with in-store pickup. Swap in the part numbers for an iPad or a pair of AirPods and the URL works exactly the same way.