“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!
ROFLMAO
Predrag, thanks a lot for your $. They have increased my egg-nest just nicely.
Sold at ~144, bought back, your AAPLs included at ~135.
Life’s good: already over $1000 benefit in the first few hours of tradiing! 😀
I read the article in the WSJ and don’t know what all the fuss is about. The article is about Jobs’ distaste for buttons and emphasis on simple, minimalist interfaces. Duhhhhhhhhh. What’s wrong with that?
The article makes an interesting point that Steve Jobs’ insistence that computer keyboards not have the cursor positioning keys lead to developers coding for the mouse which lead to the wide acceptance of the mouse.
the article is not anti-apple. It’s got some interesting thoughts.
No need to get your panties in a wad.
Chrissy! Watch your mouth, young lady! lol
OK, there may be spin, there may be delusion, there may be negative wishful thinking-but, remember everyone, this is almost always the way “The News” is reported. Sad, but true.
It doesn’t matter whether its about something as important as Iraq, or women’s fashions, or hell, chewing gum, we are going to get s**t reporting alot of the time.
My father used to say that he caught so many mistakes in the newspaper everyday about things he knew were incorrect that it made him wonder about how many mistakes were there that he didn’t know about and catch.
Frankly, I’m far more worried about faulty/sloppy reporting in general than I am about faulty/sloppy reporting on Apple.
Whatever other articles on the Wall Street Journal site are saying about iPhone sales, I thought the article about buttonless design espoused by Jobs was quite interesting.
I follow MacDailyNews and other Mac sources every day, and I don’t agree that this design feature has been widely discussed with the same historical breadth of view that Wingfield provides.
Declaimer: like Jobs, I too have a phobia about buttons (on clothes at least)
Thanks, guys, for your ‘support’… The 5% sell limit was my mistake; I had put it months ago, to protect initial investment. I should have long removed it, since I’ve been long on AAPL and have already made over 50%; more than 75% of my holdings were AAPL and I had no intention in the world of selling. I should have remembered the stupid 5% daily drop limit… but it never triggerred in the past six months, so I just totally forgot.
Well, I’m back in precisely where I got out, (actually, just slightly below), so it’s all good (and the limit is now gone, finally). Still, stories like this contine to annoy me.
For heavens sakes, I’m in the UK, and even I heard the guffaws of laughter coming from Cupertino over the number 146,000 that has had journo’s and a few silly traders in paroxysms of activity.
This article is exactly what MDN says…INSIPID.
I agree with Chrissy, the Mighty Mouse is horrible. Try the VX Revolution.
@ChrissyOne …I thought I just needed more gray matter but I really don’t like it either …maybe, Apples next mouse won’t be a mouse.
Will a better mouse be released for Leopard?
Is that not a strange question?
Hey, it was Apple’s plan when to release the iPhone. It was probably at the very last day required by AT&T. If everyone was going to measure the success or failure of the iPhone by the amount of activation in the first 30 hours, then they should have planned for that.
As it was, I think that AT&T and Apple cried all the way to the bank that weekend. Still, nobody has said how many iPhones were made available. Was that some kind of company secret?
This story is all about how businesses can make the numbers sing and dance and prove what ever comment that they want. Why should we get worked up (or even concerned) with this article? We all know how much of a success the iPhone was and is. OK, break it up. There’s nothing to see here.
Okay, now THAT was a MDN take!
@Randian- who you callin’ edumacated??
Sopme pretty irate fanboys here so let’s get some perspective on things, eh?
1) 146,000 activations is not the same as 146,000 sales. This figure will be higher and probably in line with the original analysts’ estimates (about 200-300,000) which is actually still very good.
2) The estimates of 700,000 sales over the weekend were, frankly, a bit silly. Sure, sales will be strong but not ridiculously so.
3) Let’s wait until we see the actual sales figures before drawing any conclusions. Reality is a better indicator than speculative hype or doubt.
Well lets see – you can’t activate at the store and the 30 hours is east coast time… So you buy the phone ….Takes an hour to get home…Wife makes you wait to activate…then you activate.. So people who bought sat eve are not counted at all. So I think they counted way less then 30 hours If you activated at the store the numbers would have been less but more hours included.
With folks like Nick Wingfield doing the reporting…
Apple fans now have a much better understand of just how M$$$ managed to got away with all of their crap for these many years…
If these so called reporters are going to survive this new world based upon Apple solutions there going to have to get with it or there going to left in the dust…
Maybe some ofd these reports could switch to reporting the day to day activities at the White House – the nation’s wonder boy G. W. Bush isn’t all that changing these days and beside no one is turned – so folks like Nick Wingfield can’t mess up stock prices as easily over there…
He’s totally unprofessional.
FYI an activation at ATT is a new account. That would not include all the customers that were already cingular customers and just activated their iPhone on their existing account as I did! With out any change to the plan either.
My respect for “IT professionals”, technical “experts”, Tech columnists, and Stock analyists has hit a new low.
It’s bizarre that so many people are misquoting this article. One of the veeps here (mis)quoted USA Today saying that there was only 146,000 iPhones sold, AT ALL (as in the last 30 days). I told him to go back and reread that article as I’m sure it clearly said 6/29-6/30 only and that it was only activations.
No worries, though the stock dropped almost $9, it turned in to a HUGE Call Option buy opportunity!! Which, of course, I did. I’ll make a mint today and tomorrow after the Quarterly report this afternoon…
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Andrew
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