The much ballyhooed launch of the iPhone turns out to have been much more of a flop than the long lines and all the hoopla in the press would lead you to believe.
While there have been claims of as many as 500,000 iPhones sold in the first days, the reality is that during the first two days of the launch, only 146,000 iPhones were actually activated, and the numbers rapidly plummeted following the initial frenzy.
One telecommunications analyst this week noted a “rapid decline” in demand for the iPhone, while another observed that “We have noticed decent inventories at stores, and thin demand at best. In fact, most Apple store visitors were not looking at the device and only a very small subset bought it.”
We’re not surprised, but apparently investors are. In fact according to the Dow Jones newswire, “the figure seemed to worry investors who had been primed to expect much larger numbers.”
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Hype it early…sell it at a
discount later – during the holiday season.
The trick will be to keep the early
buyers happy while they watch the same or slightly modified phone being sold at a discount.
The same thing
happened to prices on the smt 5600 smartphone when I bought it at its introduction in late 2005. I just understood that the price would drop as time went on.
It just has to be accomplished gracefully