Apple Will Not Give First-Weekend Sales of iPhone 7

Julia Love, reporting for Reuters:

Apple Inc. will not release first-weekend sales of its new iPhone 7, the company said on Thursday, making it harder for analysts to get a read on the product’s prospects amid questions over whether its popularity has peaked. […]

“As we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer pre-order that we will sell out of iPhone 7,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said. “These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers.”

One reason this makes sense is what happened two years ago:

On Sept. 28, 2015, when Apple announced record first-weekend sales of its iPhone 6, its stock dropped 2 percent, reflecting Wall Street’s worries about cooling demand.

The iPhone 6 wound up selling in far greater numbers than anyone, including Apple, expected. The opening weekend numbers didn’t help anyone foresee actual demand.

On the other hand, here’s Steve Jobs in a 2009 interview with David Pogue:

He said that Apple doesn’t see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn’t ever say how many Kindles it sells. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

★ Thursday, 8 September 2016