There has to be more to write about than the iPhone every freaking day. Come on Farhad.

It is still possible for Apple to have sold 400,000 units while AT&T only got 140,000 new service contracts... folks like our intrepid author who already had Cingular were surely a large percentage of the shoppers.

One of those points that may (or may not) be relevant is the number of people that bought the phone and then had difficulty activating it during the first two days. Obviously, 2/3rds of iPhone buyers didn't have difficulty activating their phones, but the number seemed fairly substantial based on various media reports at the time. So perhaps those suffering early registration glitches, plus those phones bought with ebay in mind will bring the actual purchases more into line with the estimates generated at the time.

It continues to amaze me that all sorts of journalists seem to have a life mission in dissing the iPhone.

I bought one for my wife. Is is perfect? No, but it's much closer to perfect than anything ever created by the Wintel boys.

It's hard to remember back this long ago but the first iPods created similar waves of praise and criticism because they were gorgeous, expensive and iTunes downloads couldn't be played on non-iPod devices. iPods are now the de facto standard for portable music players.

Steve Jobs creates very high expectations and the media buzz around the iPhone inflated those expectations to a level that nothing could meet. Multi-function phone devices all sacrifice being the best at everything to be, if well designed, pretty good at many things. From what I've seen so far, the iPhone is pretty good at everything and great at some things. And, unlike the Wintel boys, if there are problems, Apple will fix them rather than leaving the hapless consumer to spend hours trying to find a fix and hours more trying to make the fix work and hours more trying to undo the new problems created by the fix. We need more products as "flawed" as the iPhone.

Anybody remember when the phone company first offered DSL? It was a service nightmare.

I'm sorry Apple took a hit due to AT&T's vast incompetence, but maybe it will help bring about the unlocking of the iPhone sooner.

I think a lot of people bought iPhones that either didn't want to use it as a cell phone (just wanted a media player and wi-fi device) and/or didn't realize they had to swear their first born son to ATT when they went to activate it via iTunes.

Does this mean Apple only sold 150,000 iPhones?

I'm not sure what the point of this article was -- unless it was to illustrate that a vast majority of people who bought iPhones apparently love Apple but hate AT&T.

AT&T reminds me of the school bully who decides that they can be popular if they just hung around the cool kid.

In this case AT&T is sitting at Steve Jobs table at lunch, but the whole school STILL thinks AT&T is nothing but a mildly retared bully and want nothing to do with them.

Interestingly carriers e.g. Sprint just recently expired, reduced or canceled some of their deeper discounts on some of their higher end phones. Seems that everyone else is watching AT&T to set new higher baseline price points.

Account activations don't equal sales. How about you wait until Apple's earnings call before making statements like that. And as someone else said, how many customers were already using AT&T/Cingular?

...than the sales of every other embedded OS running in every other cell-phone. Despite all the hype, Apple's offering will become the same as its computer brother; an expensive, proprietary, locked down but press-coverage garnering electric hullabaloo. Why aren't we seeing any articles written about Linux growing by leaps and bounds in the smart-phone sector (from 5% in 2004 to 22% in 2005)? Or about the opensource Linux running iPhone clone OpenMoko? Because it would break the Apple navelgazing evidently.

I'm a little confused about what was reported. Was the 140,000 "new" AT&T customers? or was it all iPhone activations?

I think it was NEW customers (which were also reported as 40% of activations). If that is accurate. then the first two days were close to 400,000 phones.

eddie

AT&T has not only announced number of activations. They had also said that they had sold more phones that weekend than any other phone they've ever sold in a month. This is a problem? The fact that some "analyst" estimated 700,000 doesn't make the actual sales "slow".

I can't tell whether the news implies that AT&T stores activated 146,000 iPhones, or that 146,000 total activations of all iPhones sold that weekend at both Apple and AT&T stores occurred? I thought a lot of the AT&T store sales were activated on the spot and not through iTunes. But maybe I'm misunderstanding something.