Last week, analysts Tony Sacconagui at Bernstein Research looked at quarterly financial numbers from Apple and AT&T, looked again, and did a little bit of head-scratching. Apple claims to have sold 3.7 million iPhones to date, but AT&T claimed to have activated only 2 million iPhones. Although the figures don’t account for some inaccuracies and iPhones that had been purchased over the end-of-year holidays but not yet activated, the figures seemed to indicate that at whopping 1.4 million of the iPhone sold to date are either sitting in inventory, being used in a phone-free “iPod touch” mode until buyer’s wireless contracts expired…or that purchasers have deliberately unlocked the iPhones to re-sell or for use on networks other than AT&T.
Tag Archive: Gene Munster
First Weekend iPhone Sales: 500,000+
For readers who may have been in a cave during the last month—or who were perhaps abducted by aliens and only just returned to Earth—Apple launched it’s much-anticipated iPhone on Friday. Although most Apple stores and AT&T corporate stores did see people lining up for the 6 PM start of sales on Friday, the companies were able to meet initial demand in all but a few locations, and a feared iPhone sell-out never materialized—no doubt to the chagrin of folks who waited in line for units they hoped to unload on eBay at astonishing markups.
iPod #1 with American Teens, Survey Shows
“In its bi-annual ‘Taking Stock With Teens’ survey obtained by The Mac Observer, research analysts Michael Olson and Gene Munster found that of 518 students, the number of kids owning an iPodhad risen dramatically. 56% said they owned an iPod, compared to 40% as reported in the company’s Fall survey. The next closest competitor in the current survey was Sony, which was chosen by 14% ofdevice owners, followed by iRiver at 7% and Rio at 5%. 17% of respondents said they owned others brands, including Dell and Creative.
But it was numbers of those planning to buy in the near future that were just as interesting: Of the 59% of students expecting to purchase a device within the next year, 70% expect to buy an iPod. While that number was the same in the Fall survey, only 46% of students were looking to buy a device at that time.”
iMac Could Be Lower Priced In 2005
“Apple Computer Inc. could decide to sell a lower-priced version of its Macintosh computer to attract consumers already enamored of its iPod music player and annoyed by security problems with Windows PCs, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
“We believe that it is not out of the question that Apple would try to capitalize on this opportunity with a more widely accessible product,” analyst Gene Munster said Thursday.”
This makes perfect sense. The low priced Apple iPod is the perfect way to introduce consumers to the Apple brand. If the quality of the iPod is better than people expect, why wouldn’t their computer systems? That’s exactly what Apple is playing on.
