“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!