“The iPhone is Steve Jobs’s attempt to crack a juicy new market for Apple Inc. But it’s also part of a decades-long campaign by Mr. Jobs against a much broader target: buttons,” Nick Wingfield reports for The Wall Street Journal.
Wingfield reports, “The resulting look is one of the sparest ever for Apple, a company known for minimalist gadgets. While many technology companies load their products up with buttons, Mr. Jobs treats them as blemishes that add complexity to electronics products and hinder their clean aesthetics. (Early iPhone sales figures from AT&T Inc. disappointed Wall Street.)”
MacDailyNews Take: Wingfield is hardly the only idiot at fault with that parenthetical falsity about iPhone “sales,” but he’ll do for taking the brunt for now: The figure announced by AT&T are iPhone activations over the first 30 hours of availability, not iPhone sales in the first weekend (as has been and will be widely misreported until later today when Apple releases results).
Wingfield continues with his insipid article about buttons here, and misses the most interesting point completely: Apple’s Mighty Mouse is a one-button mouse by default. Users can enable the other “hidden” buttons via System Preferences. That the Mighty Mouse ships as a one-button mouse and can scale from 3-year-old preschoolers up to advanced power users is a triumph of design that no other mouse can match. But, we wouldn’t want to discuss something that’s actually slightly interesting when we can plod on weakly over the oft-trod history of Apple design and sloppily misreport iPhone sales figures, now would we, Nick?
Instead of wasting your time, your readers’ time, and space in the WSJ, Nick, how about reporting that iPhone sales for the first weekend haven’t even been released, but that AT&T’s first 30-hours of activations are being substituted in widely-scattered, completely incorrect reports that have adversely affected Apple’s stock price? You do work for The Wall Street Journal, not Better Homes and Gardens, right?
Again, Wingfield serves as the punching bag here, standing in for literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lazy journalists, hack tech pundits, bloggers, people looking to move stock prices for their own interests, the moron in the next cubicle over, astroturfers, idiotic analysts, and anyone else who’s reporting that “iPhone sales for the first weekend totaled 146,000” when that number marks how many AT&T iPhone activations occurred the first 30 hours of availability. That is the fact. It’s sad when The WSJ all the way on down to the predictably-wrong Joe Schmo’s Blog can’t get simple, easily-researched, basic facts right. Perhaps they just don’t want to get it right?
Well, enjoy it fellas, it’ll likely be the last chance you’ll ever have to write about “poor iPhone sales,” even if it is a lie!
not everyone is a maczealot, which means they follow apple news 24/7.
that’s why you’ll get stories like this that snowball.
get over it.
He meant sparsest, not sparest.
It should be interesting to see whether Apple will call out the hounds to cancel out negative analysts or not. If they do not then that means sales have been slower than anticipated. But how many iPhone sales did Apple predict vs. the analysts prediction? What’s your prediction?
MW: response-as in I hope Steve does with vigor!
@drbyers, so regardless of whether or not an article is about Macs, if one is not a “zealot” of the subject matter excuses journalistic integrity? Sloppy journalism extends well beyond Macs and Apple. MDN is justified in grousing about it here because (drum roll, please) this is a Mac news site.
Get over it.
146.000 in 30 hours means 80 activations per minute – maybe that was the *technical* limit on the AT&T-server-side?
You know, I am trying to remember another situation where the reporters all jump on the same bandwagon with a limited amount of information, yet they manage to sway a small but vocal percent of the populace, which in turn, hammer at certain officials, until the real events have not even been given merit. I just can’t quite recall where I read about that. Well, maybe after I rack my brain for awhile, it will come to me……
30 hours – this is what I’ve been screaming in my mind every time I read one of these distorted reports.
I agree with the MDN take wholeheartedly, though the mismatched past-, present- and future-tense causes my inner grammar nazi to cringe.
Thank you lazy journalists… Great opportunity to buy more stock…
I heard they only sold 11 iPhones.
Just wait for it. Frankly, I hope some of the idiots that have written that “sales” were only 146,000 get sued by whoever sold stock based on that information.
By the end of the weekend Apple had moved their initial stock.
They couldn’t have sold any more than they put on shelves and they didn’t sell any less. Apple did what they expected/wanted.
I believe he actually did mean “sparest”, not “sparsest”.
Spare – adjective * elegantly simple. “Her clothes are smart and spare in style”
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!
MDN Magic Word: Justice!
Thanks a load of $ journalists. Sold all my bunch at ~144, buying back with a nice hefty profit!!!!
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Hope to make not less than $5000 in one go!!
it’s a HUGE mistake, 146,000 activations, NOT including overall sales, NOT including all the people that couldn’t activate for a few days and all the sales inbetween. You”ll see that number go way up. We’ll all see come 5pm today. no worried here. It took MS 7 months to sell a million Zunes, i have YET to see one of them.
@Gwendo
81.11 per minute
I made that comment yesterday. WTF? Unless it had to do with the 40 percent(?) that switched from other carriers.
I love my iPhone. Who wouldn’t?
Only ignorant PC users I guess.
Try it. You will like it.
@Steve Ballmer
“I heard they only sold 11 iPhones.”
I believe you meant “I heard they sold ONLY 11 iPhones.” Not only are you guilty of misplacing your office chair (a very common problem on the Redmond campus, I hear), you misplace your modifiers as well.
How very sad for an “educated” person.
For only the first 2 days it isn’t bad at all and don’t forget that it were only the early adapters that bought one, just like with the ipod.
The rest will follow after a a few months (internationally too)
Stupid article(s) made my TD Ameritrade kick in and sell at 5% decline. Now I’m completely out!!! Now I have to get back in and I don’t have a time for keeping an eye on the ticker all day, waiting for a dip to jump back in! I could just kill those guys!!!
On top of that, articles are popping up how:
1. demand has dropped dramatically;
2. iPhone is difficult to use, lacks features and is, basically, a ho-hum device.
Will it affect the phone? I doubt; but it aparently does affect stock price and this annoys me a lot!
Sorry everyone.
Son please take your meds.
BTW I was one of the 11 that bought an iPhone along with a beautiful 24″ iMac. But I still love you….
Arrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!!!
THE SKY IS FALLING. THE SKY IS FALLING.
SELL SELL SELL
It you’re not pissed enough drop into CNET and see their take.
One thing we need to remember is that there are people with families to feed that are getting paid good money to mislead and misdirect with all of the disinformation they can possibly muster without getting sued. I remember the exact same post-opening sales numbers extravaganza when the first gen. iPods hit the street. Expectations were high prior to sales, competitors were either running scared or laughing the iPods potential off, and post-sale numbers were apparently well below what Apple had hoped for and all nay-sayers jumped on the next-day sales numbers like horny dogs on bitches in heat. And yet, here we are with the iPod today – need I say more.
In a way I’m glad that it looks like the numbers are going to be more “realistic” otherwise I’d be a little fearful of the iPhone just being a flash in the pan with no positive long term outlook.
Predag: How does Harry Truman’s quote go? “If you can’t stand the heat in the kitchen, get out.” Yesterday was a good day to be buying AAPL stock for $135; auto selling on a 5% drop is foolish tactic when the future is so promising. Try auto buying at a 5% drop if you are going to day trade. It is these shallow articles that creat buying opportunities, not selling opportunities – AAPL is a good long term purchase (buy and hold) for long term you won’t be sorry.
I still hate the Mighty Mouse. Luckily Microsoft makes *one* decent product to fill the gap.