“More than a million people placed early orders on Friday for Apple Inc’s latest iPhone, the last product that the company debuted before the death of its co-founder Steve Jobs,” Sinead Carew and Poornima Gupta report for Reuters
“Orders for the iPhone 4S, which will appear on store shelves this Friday, surpassed Apple’s previous one-day record of 600,000 sales for the iPhone 4, pushing the company’s shares up 4.3 percent to $385.50 on the Nasdaq stock market,” Carew and Gupta report. “The new phone disappointed some fans when Apple introduced it last week, but it is proving to be a bigger draw because more telephone companies are carrying it and it will appear in more countries, analysts said.”
“Another big factor may be Jobs. Massive outpourings of grief and sympathy over his death last Wednesday at the age of 56, along with testaments to his genius and status as a visionary business leader in the media and by Apple products users online may have spurred sales,” Carew and Gupta report. “‘Many potential Apple customers, who have been on the fences before, will probably now want to (buy) it,’ said Steven Osinski, marketing professor at San Diego State University. ‘It’s no different than when John Lennon was assassinated, sales of Beatles records shot up for a little while.'”
Carew and Gupta report, “‘It had everything people wanted. The market was disappointed, but the customers looked past the headline to see the content of the device itself,’ said Hudson Square analyst Daniel Ernst. The 4S is on the Sprint Nextel network, which is joining AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless as an iPhone seller for the first time. In Japan, Apple added KDDI as a distributor.”
Read more in the full article here.