Comments on: Why Apple sold only 17.1 million iPhones

By: tim jones

tim jones — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:43:20 +0000

“Siri, what does the S in iPhone 4S mean ?”
“Stupid”

By: His Shadow

His Shadow — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 01:52:45 +0000

If you were being accurate, you’d have put ‘only” in quotation marks.

By: Idon't Know

Idon't Know — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:18:45 +0000

Apple met their projections. Wall Street didn’t meet their unrealistic projections. It’s that simple.

By: Ruben van der Laan

Ruben van der Laan — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:12:43 +0000

As usual assumption is the mother of all f*ck-ups…

By: ronald

ronald — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:33:31 +0000

Hence the question marks.

By: lrd

lrd — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:54:56 +0000

Apple failed to mention:

1) the east coast hurricane that stalled sales for at least three days throughout many of it’s biggest retail markets, and
2) the north east cost earthquake which again had an impact on sales, and
3) the London riots which caused several stores to close for days.

By: teddy cranzowski

teddy cranzowski — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:46:19 +0000

The sequential drop should not have been a surprise for a few reasons. If you combine a quarter before a new launch you get inventory drawdown plus buyers delaying purchases. Given the extended period the iPhone 4 was in the market and then extent of the iPhone 5 rumors this was larger than usual. I addition, last quarter was unusually high as iPhone was rolled out at an unusually high number of new carriers and countries. The channel fill alone boosted the previous quarters numbers. You can add to that the mistake in the year over year growth projections that applied growth rates to a 2010 quarter that included the iPhone 4 release to match instead with a drawdown/delayed purchase quarter and you have the perfect recipe for people to be projecting numbers that are way too high.

By: Theli

Theli — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:09:56 +0000

17m + 4m {hold backs} = 17m for this quarter. If you added the 4 million iPhones sold at launch to the previous quarter, you’d have to subtract them from the current one. You can’t count them twice.

By: tmay

tmay — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:12:43 +0000

Apple has never stated one way or another if the 4S was actually delayed or if in fact it was quiet shift of the yearly iPhone introduction cycle one quarter forward to take advantage of the Christmas buying season. Wharever the reason, Apple did pretty well avoiding the Osborne Effect.

By: Rdx2

Rdx2 — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:43:20 +0000

Sales dip has nothing to do with competition from Android mainly and WP7 to a small extent but everything to do with Gizmodo and techcrunch. I was thinking exactly the same thing, I wonder if we did not have rumors last year.. or it is magical this year.