“Apple Inc. on Wednesday announced it sold and shipped 270,000 iPhones in the first two days of the device’s debut weekend, nearly double the number its wireless partner claimed had been activated in that same stretch,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld.
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer “acknowledged the activation delays that plagued many of the first buyers. ‘AT&T did have some activation problems,’ he said. ‘We would like to apologize to those customers who had a less than a perfect activation experience,'” Keizer reports.
“At the time, Apple spokespeople maintained that the delays affected only a small percentage of buyers. If, however, the 124,000-iPhone difference between the two figures is attributable to users not being able to activate, the problem may have hit up to 46% of those who purchased an iPhone on June 29 or June 30,” Keizer reports.
“‘AT&T said more iPhones were sold in the first weekend than they had sold in the first month of any other wireless device in their entire history,'” said Tim Cook, chief operating officer,” Keizer reports.
Full article here.
That assumes that every single person who bought an iphone received it instantly (not true for online orders) and tried to activate it prior to close of business on Saturday (unlikely).
Another ridiculous article from clueless “experts”.
Wonder how Microsoft will spin this on MSNBC???
klapka: I agree with you. However I don’t believe that that 270,000 number includes online orders (which weren’t shipped until after the quarter so won’t count as sales).
I personally had my iPhone for 2 days before I activated it, because I had to sort out some issues with my AT&T account before I activated it. My delay had nothing to do with “activation problems”.
Keizer’s are among the stupidest comments of the day — especially since nearly every article about the first weekend mentioned people were buying a second one as a gift…
OH NOES! But I thought that half those iPhones were actually accessory purchases and not phones at all…
Okay, I’d like to address that. I was there opening day. I saw a lot of people buying a lot of phones, sometimes 2 and 3 at a time. I did not see ONE single person buying accessories. I’m not saying that no one did, but it was certainly not half. All the people I saw just held up fingers (over the din) indicating “4” or “8”, or sometimes “1” or “2” for how many phones they wanted. I didn’t see this supposed flood of docking station or extra earbud purchases.
Grasping at straws for any kind of negative publicity about the iPhone or AT&T …
They hope that somehow this will tranlate into the iPhone becoming a failure ….
It’s too late morons ….. brilliance, design, and logic have won over greed, incompetence and stupidity.
The cat’s out of the bag!
Why not just come in …. the waters warm and cleansing …
You’ll feel so much better throwing off your MicroSoft suit of rusty armour and enjoying the freedom of the Apple speedo.
“The company booked just $5 million in iPhone sales for the quarter, most of it for accessories.”
—Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek
Dumb. Ass.
I am sorry but AT&T was not able to handle the volume. And although it was impressive that Apple sold 270,000 phones in two days, it was no where near some of the predictions being touted by analysts such as 500,000 to 750,000. Which doubly means AT&T really dropped the ball when it came to activations. I always said that I would buy an iPhone when the network catches up to its capabilities. Right now its like running a Ferrari on a muddy, rutted, dirt road.
i don’t think that was a case of half the users being affected by AT&T incompetence. I think it is the case of many other things. Let me break it down:
20% purchased by early adopters. New to AT&T network
20% purchased by early adopters. already existing AT&T customers
5% purchased a 2nd iphone to resell on Ebay
10% purchased a 2nd iphone by magazines/online blogs to review, take apart, experiment
15% purchased by competitors to take apart and reverse engineer. This include the likes of MS, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola,Blackberry
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30% a combination of all of the above who could not get activated on the AT&T network.
Since everyone is effectively isolated from everyone else, no one can really verify the claim that only a few % of iPhone customers had issues. Unless someone takes a poll – but does it really matter now?
AT&T are hardly going to tell the truth and say that around 40% of customers had problems with activation are they? It’d look pretty bad for them and their network, even though there were special circumstances causing it.
Alternatively, if they’d been upfront and said there might be delays, maybe people might have delayed purchase too, waiting until things had quietened down a little.
There’s little doubt these things were underplayed, to ensure a good sales run leading up to the end of the quarter.
Had the device been somewhat operational (e.g. iPod/wifi usage) for a few days while the AT&T network caught up, most of the annoyance people felt while they waited for activation would have been alleviated. I hope they do this in Europe, if the networks can’t get the activations performed quickly.
Let’s not forget also Verizon and the other carriers stalled when transferring
people’s existing numbers over to AT$T.
According to the webcast:
270,000 was phone sales only (not accessories)
Sales from Brick-and -Mortar stores only (not on-line sales)
Included all Apple stores and some AT&T stores, though it wasn’t clear whether the ‘some’ was all the AT&T stores that were selling the phone (since not all AT&T stores were selling them.
Why is it so important to these hacks that activations didn’t match sales? They were obviously not likely to anyway…
Quick answer – easy anti-Apple FUD.
I ordered mine online the first Saturday they were available and just got mine this past Monday, so yeah, I don’t think activation problems plagues half of iPhone buyers. It just means that AT&T couldn’t possibly give an accurate number of sales in the first 30 hours. Only Apple could do that.
It’s shocking to me that Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours they were on sale. It took the iPod a lot longer to reach that number when it was released. I can’t wait for the end of this quarter to find out how many iPhones Apple really sells in a quarter. I have a feeling it’s going to be in the multi-millions. Steve’s goal of 10 million by the end of 2008 will probably be met by the end of Christmas 2007.
I bought one for myself and another as a gift. Mine was activated y 6:20 p.m. PDT Friday night. The other also activated quickly, easily – but not until Monday. Both are existing AT&T accounts.
I suspect I am representative of a larger sample.
AT&T sucks and they were ill prepared for the iPhone launch. What Apple should have done is forced AT&T to refund everyones $36 activation fee instead of just apologizing for the activation issues. The iPhone itself is great, let’s just hope AT&T can get their sh*t together sometime here in the next 5 years.
Just as I don’t update system software in the middle of an important project, I would have used my old phone, not chancing an activation problem delaying my Saturday plans, and activated on Sunday.
I was involved in the purchase of 6 iPhones. I was an existing AT&T customer and was just adding a $20 data package to my existing account. My activation took less than 10 minutes.
I assisted two of my cousins (one of which wanted to keep her NY number even though she was living in CA – I was successful at talking her out of it). They were both moving from other carriers, bought their phones of June 29th and didn’t even attempt to activate until June 30th. There activations probably took about an hour each. Since they weren’t keeping their existing numbers and they received credit checks at the AT&T store, I can’t really say why their activations weren’t immediate.
The most interesting was an existing AT&T customer who has had his cell phone so long that he had a 415 area code phone number, even though the area in which he has always lived was changed to a 650 area code years ago. He spent hours on the phone (a lot of it was waiting for people to get back to him), the end result is he was activated on Monday, July 2nd, but was required to go to an AT&T store with two forms of ID. We found out that the problem was that his account records were so old that they didn’t contain information currently requested to set up an account. Way to treat your long time customers AT&T…
2 of the iPhones were purchased as gifts and weren’t even given to the recipients until later.
justified: “The company booked just $5 million in iPhone sales for the quarter, most of it for accessories.”
—Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek
Dumb. Ass.
???
Do you have any proof to the contrary? Think about it, Apple sold 270,000 iPhones at $500-600 and yet they only recognize $5M. That’s only $18.52 per iPhone. It’s a far cry from recognizing the revenue in 2 years at $62.50-75.00 per iPhone per quarter. That suggests Apple decides to book the revenue of the iPhone sold in the last 2 days in last quarter in a different financial quarter. That makes sense since Apple’s reason to spread the revenue is to support iPhone for a long term. If Apple had booked the revenue from June 29-30 in the last quarter, early adopters would have wasted the support for the iPhone in a quarter where iPhone wasn’t available except on the last two days.
Chances are, Burrow got it right. Apple booked all the revenue from the accessories which doesn’t need to be spread out and booked a small portion from the iPhone revenue for the two days of the last quarter. That way, the early adopters get support for 8 full quarters.
I don’t think the online order counts as part of the 270k sold since it wasn’t shipped and charged within the first 30 hours.
@Joop
I agree completely. Only apple could give an accurate SALES figure.
@ facts
Also agreed that sales and activation numbers were not likely to be the same. Especially over such a short time frame.
Which just shows once again why, ultimately, AT&T should just sit back, relax and let Apple “do the talking” during these early stages. In short, if you want to know what is going on… ask the ones that KNOW.
@ Rob
Tell me, sir . . . what wireless network provided DOES NOT suck in your not-so-humble opinion? Every such provider I know of (from Verizon to Sprint to you-name-it) is absolutely LOATHED by someone like you, so who would the “Robster” suggest that Apple partner with?
Huh? Huh, O Perfect One?
No matter which service you recommend here, I’ll show you THOUSANDS of postings by users as learned as you who HATE IT!)
That’s a silly and simple-minded argument. What about iPhones purchased as gifts or the extra one some people were buying to sell on eBay? What about people who (after having spent an exhausting day waiting in line) decided to wait until Sunday to open the box? What about online purchases that were “sold” during the first two days, but not delivered until the following week?
If almost half (or even one quarter) of the initial iPhone customers had activation issues, there would have been much more noise about the problem in the media. “Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld” is obviously running out of things to write about this week.
“If, however, the 124,000-iPhone difference between the two figures is attributable to users not being able to activate, the problem may have hit up to 46% of those who purchased an iPhone on June 29 or June 30,” Keizer reports.”
Everything here hinges on the word “if”. There is no basis. The entire article is speculation designed to sell words or generate hits.
Yea, its assinine to assume the 124K phones had acitvation problems. I brought an extra phone as a gift that was given to the reciever 2 weeks later… I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.
People pay attention to what has already been said numerous times – online sales are not counted in the 270,000. Apple cannot count them until they bill for them, and they cannot bill them until they ship them. It is highly unlikely that they shipped any quantity of them on Friday or Sat.