Whose Estimates?

The business press is playing Apple’s record opening weekend iPhone sales as “a miss”. Bloomberg’s headline: “Apple iPhone 5 Misses Estimates as 5 Million Units Sold”. Business Insider (they even put theirs in all-caps): “iPhone 5 Opening Weekend Sales Come in Worse Than Expected”. But whose estimates? Whose expectations? Apple’s own? Nope, they didn’t release any public predictions. The estimates were from Wall Street analysts — guys who have a history of getting things wrong. And they didn’t even know how to account for iPhone 5’s (see that?) that have already been pre-ordered but have not yet been shipped or delivered. Apple’s 5 million number is for iPhones that are in customers’ hands.

The question we all want answered is how strong demand is for the iPhone 5. We don’t know that yet. All we know so far is that Apple produced 5 million of them in time for delivery last Friday and they sold all of them. There might be millions of additional pending pre-orders. (Including mine.)

★ Monday, 24 September 2012