Last night when I checked the Apple iPhone Retail Availability Page, I noticed that only 2 Apple stores had iPhones left: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Tigard, Oregon. By tonight, there very well could be red dots completely running down the list of Apple stores. AT&T has been reporting that nationwide their stores are completely sold out as well. Somewhere close to the order of a million phones have been sold since Friday at 6pm, which completely blows away the old record set by the Motorola RAZR for initial sales. The Motorola RAZR is one of the world's bestselling phones, selling 50 million of the thin clamshell within 2 years.
2 years, 50 million cellphones -- is this a record that I think Apple can beat? Only if they open it up to more carriers. Motorola didn't lock their RAZR to any one carrier for two-years, but Apple's iPhone is locked to AT&T (in the US) for the next two years. Currently Apple's production capacity for producing iPhones is on the order of 1 to 2 million iPhones a month (hence why there's a 2-4 week wait on the iPhone direct from Apple), and this seems to be a good rate of sales for AT&T. Now, I can't imagine AT&T being upset at Apple for getting 2 years of renewed contract from a million people in one weekend, but with all the reviews of the iPhone blasting AT&T's network, it's a certainty that AT&T have some work to do on the network.
The active minority of people who are definitely interested were the ones out on Friday, the early adopters of the iPhone. If that much interest can be generated by the early adopters, and if the iPhone is as good as everyone says it is, I expect sales of the iPhone to continue fairly solidly through Christmas. January's MacWorld will probably be some new version (I'll patiently wait and cross my fingers for a 3G version).
This week there was quite a bit of hubbub about the activation for the iPhone being cracked, but which limited the iPhone to be a very expensive iPod without the phone capabilities. The worst thing for AT&T right now is if the iPhone could be completely unlocked such that it could be used with any carrier; funny enough, for Apple, this would be the best thing that could happen; how many people don't want AT&T but want an iPhone? Apple doesn't need to worry about more sales at this point however, demand is more than supply, and probably will be for some time to come.
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