The mysterious case of the missing iPhone activations

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iphoneactivation.jpgSomeone call Poirot! We’ve got a mystery on our hands…

Apple announced its latest set of financial results yesterday, and revealed that in its first two days on sale in the US, 270,000 iPhones were sold. It’s not the 500,000+ that analysts were claiming, but it’s still a decent number.

But hang on. In its own financial results earlier this week, Apple’s operator partner AT&T Wireless said it had activated 146,000 iPhones in the first two days. Which means, as mathematicians will have already worked out with a pencil, a discrepancy of 124,000 handsets.

What happened? Did all those people not manage to activate their iPhones? There were reports of problems, but not on this scale – it’s not much less than half the total number sold.

Or did people scramble down to the Apple and AT&T stores to buy the handsets, then leave them gathering dust on the mantelpiece at home until they could be arsed to activate them a week or so later? Frankly, that sounds a little unlikely.

Anyway, Apple is now predicting it’ll pass the million mark by September, again, conflicting with analyst claims that they’d passed that landmark already. Who are these analysts, and why are they still employed? Just a thought.

Meanwhile, iPod sales were 9.82 million last quarter, a 21% rise from the same period a year earlier – a big deal, considering people have been predicting that iPod sales were beginning to flatten out. It’s probably the same analysts, all sitting in a room with dunce caps on.

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Stuart Dredge
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