07/25/2007, 5:00pm, EDT
Wednesday, July 25th
Apple sells 270,000 iPhones in first 2 days
On Wednesday, the Cupertino-based company also posted greater-than-expected profits of $818 million on record Mac sales and growing gross margin: the company said it shipped 1.76 million Macs during the quarter, exceeding the year-ago quarter by 33 percent.
The numbers were well ahead of street consensus estimates of $5.28 billion and $0.72.
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So, how much do YOU believe that 130,000 iPhones sat idle until the next week? That folks shelling out 536 or 636 bucks (oh wait, the 36 comes in when you activate it) sat staring at the packaging until the following week when they may have gotten around to activation? I think not.
In fiscal quarter 3 (ending in June), Apple only had about 20 business hours of iPhone sales (and that's a liberal estimate, since it assumes Fri 6-midnight, Sat 8AM-10PM). In that first weekend, there were 14 more working hours.
If the pace of those sales continued on Sunday at the same rate it did on Fri and Sat, that would extrapolate the above figure to about 460,000, which is more-or-less in line or better than Gartner's, Pipper Jaffray's, and others' estimates.
Expecting to sell one million by the end of next quarter is extremely conservative, to put it mildly. Some two weeks ago, an unnamed source from the AT&T sales force was quoted stating that AT&T had already activated over million iPhones after first two weeks of sale.
I'm expecting AAPL shares to hit $150 tomorrow... :)
Either way; the 130,000 phones that were bought but not activated on Friday/Saturday got activated on Sunday, when they were presented (as gifts) to the intended recipients. While there was a number of those who couldn't activate until Sunday, Monday, even Tuesday (about 10,000), almost everyone standing in line on Friday an Saturday bought two phones. One was activated very quickly; the second, not necessarily.
People are digesting the numbers and making the right conclusions.