“Michael Blair, a Seeking Alpha contributor and long-time bear on the shares, wrote about the 10 million iPhones 6s that Apple sold in the first three days,” Chuck Jones writes for Seeking Alpha. “While his article contained some correct information it also incorrectly represented a chart that I used in a Forbes.com post (I believe it was my September 22 article or it could have been my September 23 article on Apple not filing an 8-K but am not sure since he did not link to it) along with a number of other items about Apple and its management.”
“Blair wrote ”Units shipped’ means just that, units shipped, not necessarily sold to end users,'” Jones writes. “He is correct that units shipped are not sales to end users but Apple doesn’t report units shipped, it reports sales. Note that almost all the other smartphone vendors talk shipments and not sales, which are not as solid as sales.”
MacDailyNews Take:
“It is true that Apple does count units that it has shipped to carriers as sales but this would only be a concern if you thought that the units that were sent to the carriers would not be sold and returned to Apple or sold for discounted prices,” Jones writes. “Matt Lew wrote a great piece on when iPhone units are counted as sales which you can read via this link.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is wholly unsurprising because Michael Blair is a feckless John C. Dvorak wannabe whom we routinely ignore since his “thought” processes and profligate hit-whoring make Dvorak seem like the Hawaiian-shirted offspring of Albert Einstein and Mother Theresa.
Related articles:
Apple’s first weekend iPhone 6/Plus sales top 10 million, set new record – September 22, 2014
Apple sets new record: First day preorders for 64-bit iPhone 6/Plus top four million units – September 15, 2014
It depends how you define “sold”. If an AT&T store has 100 iPhones available on opening weekend I would assume Apple considers that a sale regardless whether all 100 phones are actually sold to end consumers or not.
True that there’s a fine line definition there, but how many retail outlets have been able to keep a single iPhone 6 in stock?
In all the years Apple has reported units sold, they’ve been the units sold as born out by their subsequent financial reports. It’s pretty simple. It’s their competition that have promoted shipments as sales, and later had to recant.
Apple considers those iPhone units in the AT&T store inventory to be sold when they are actually sold. They don’t count filling the pipeline (or overfilling the pipeline to pump the numbers, as many competitors have done and paid for later).
If the iPhone is in shipment to an end user, then their credit card has been charged and the sale has been made.
What are you attempting to imply, rogifan?
Mr. Blair,
Please do call any Apple store or Verizon store or whatever store you please right now and ask them if they have any iPhone6 64Gig Space Grey units in stock ‘cuz you need to get one today.
They will stop laughing at you eventually.
While it’s not the best accounting method out there, from my experience from trying to find an iPhone6, at least for the first couple of weeks that’s a bet you can take to the bank. Just like Apple is doing with all the money they’ll be making from selling every iPhone6 they can ship.
AnalCysts are painful.
Apple only reports sales to end users. When, on rare occasion, the numbers of sell-in and sell-through differ, they note that (see last quarter’s conference call concerning iPads, as an example).
The 10 million number (which is likely 15 million or more by now) is sales. To end users. Not channel fill.
We could call this guy Goober, but I do not want to offend the original Goober.
Once you become familiar with Michael’s writings, they become rather entertaining. Sort of like Baghdad Bob. As reliable as sunrise and sunset. No matter what the news is, it’s always bad for Apple.
“Michael Blair, a Seeking Alpha contributor and long-time bear on the shares…”
I wonder how that’s been working out for his retirement portfolio? I know mine has done very will by being BULLISH and LONG on AAPL
As one of the 4 million pre-orders, my unlocked 128GB Space Gray iPhone 6 Plus is still neither sold nor shipping ’til October 13-20. I’m 100% certain all 10 million iPhone 6/Pluses were sold through stores to people not only to stores last weekend. I made the mistake of waiting first in the queue at a Best Buy where they still haven’t received any 6 Plus models as of the 29th instead of driving over to the Palo Alto Apple Store where I probably would have scored the above model in a locked ATT Next deal I could have lived with. 😢
Give the guy a break, just because he is always wrong doesn’t mean he won’t be right one of these days.
Can we just leave out the “Lyst” from the title Analyst for this guy? 😛
This is a bit of a foolish comment, your order book is a good represention of the business position. Please get your fundamentals right. I think people sometimes just post articles and dont have a clue what they are talking about.
Currently waiting in a 25 deep line to get into an Apple store, a week after launch. Pretty sure Apple has a monster hit of epic proportions on its hand..