Well the Street sent shares of Apple tumbling yesterday as AT&T reported a mere 146,000 phones activated in the last two days of it’s fiscal quarter.  Now, remember that one of those days the stores didn’t even start selling phones until 6PM.  Also there were various reported issues of iPhone buyers not being able to activate their phones due to problems with AT&T.

Many an iPhone buyer also left Apple Stores toting their limit of two devices–presumably one for themselves to be activated right away and another for a friend/relative/hopeful eBay buyer (though many of those may see returns to the store haha…I wonder how many people dropped $900 for a phone they could have gotten the next day at MSRP).  So, in theory there could be a huge number of iPhones that were sold but not activated in that short two-day window, especially given the aforementioned activation issues.

But that kind of logic is not the kind of thing investors think about, and as such shares slid from $143.75 to end yesterday at $134.89.  Yikes.  But hey, Apple swings a few bucks every day it seems, so I’m personally not worried.  The other thing that doesn’t worry me is the fact that this was only activations in the first two days of sales.  The phone has been on sale for awhile now, so we really only have a small picture of how the phone is actually performing.

Hopefully we’ll get a more accurate number tonight on Apple’s earnings call.  And as this article on AppleInsider pointed out,

More telling first-weekend iPhone figures are expected as part of Apple’s third fiscal quarter earnings report on Wednesday, where the Cupertino-based firm will report on the total number of iPhones sold during its first two days rather than just those units that had been activated.

What they probably won’t tell us is how many of those eBay phones were pulled and sent back under the return policy…but ohh well.  Also, if Apple and AT&T are actually worried about the phone sales slowing to much too quickly, we may yet see the 3G version before the ’07 holiday season.


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