Surprising (to me at least) iPhone Numbers
Is demand for the iPhone in America already starting to wane?
AT&T, the exclusive American carrier of the iPhone, activated just 900,000 iPhones during the fourth quarter, the company revealed during its earnings conference call Thursday. It wrapped up the year with "just at or slightly under 2 million iPhone customers," according to company executives.
Apple announced at Macworld that it has sold 4 million iPhones through the middle of January, and Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, thinks the gap between the figures means that Apple might have a demand problem. He released a research note Thursday after AT&T's earnings saying that the carrier's figures imply that an awful lot of inventory is building up at Apple's channel partners.
Read the rest:
Report: iPhones piling up at AT&T stores
For my money, while it's a lovely device the lack of a keyboard and the lack of third party apps makes it an unattractive option. I couldn't live without my Treo and a healthy part of that is the wealth of third party applications I'm able to jam onto the thing.
And yeah, I'm sure mobile Safari would make me all tingly with it's slickosity, especially when compared to the sickly Blazer, but to be honest it probably wouldn't matter all that much. most of the time, if I'm surfing a site on my phone I'm not usually interested in bells and whistles anyway. I'm usually just looking for info, and Blazer's optimized mode is usually better for that than a full blown website anyway (Just another reason those black screen iPhone commercials drove me nuts. I wanted yell at the screen sometimes since they would imply that the only way you could quickly browse to a site to get someone's name is with the magical powers of the iPhone. )
The thing that's surprising is that I really felt like I was in the minority and that there was the usual insatiable Apple technolust for the iPhone. Of course, the numbers could be wrong and the demand could be as insane as I expected it to be, but if the numbers are accurate that's sure a lot of unsold iPhones.
Of course, thinking about it, I only know three people with iPhones. I see more Blackberries and Treos than that at pretty much any meeting with more than maybe seven or eight participants… Not a huge sampling of course, but it still seems like a small number.
Tom OKeefe Says:
I agree. To be honest since the first day that Steve Jobs let everyone know the iPhone was in the works and made it clear that AT&T would be the carrier for the US I told myself that I would never purchase one. I think the device is a cool eye candy entertaining thing to play with. After a few hours using it would become pretty annoying. A lot of the key features aren't ones I even care about enough to switch to AT&T. Blackberries and Treos are the way to go. Less fluff and more useful features without feeling like you're playing a game.
Posted: January 28th, 2008 at 12:21 pm