An interesting pattern on iPhone sales

When I checked the iPhone availability tonight I found that only two locations in California (both in SF) had product for tomorrow. And the red dots (those stores that are sold out at this point) were predominantly on the West Coast or in tech centers although if you want an iPhone tomorrow Colorado and Oregon look like good places to find one.

There are also stories about people having a problem in activating their phone. (As noted in an earlier post it took me about 20 minutes to activate and to synch). I changed a phone number (switched a number from an existing AT&T phone) and that was no problem and I thought the AT&T screens to walk you through it were very helpful. I will be interested to see the sales figures in the first full week. According to the contractor who did the activations, Synchronoss, they were pleased with the process and results. Even with a very small percentage of problems in this process unhappy customers can be created and CNET has made an effort to compile those. It does not hurt that one of their correspondents, Declan McCullagh, took 39 hours to activate. One other writer griped that without activation the product was not usable. There is some logic to that, since a good part of the utility comes from the synchronization, but it could produce some mighty grumpy customers.

Piper Jaffray estimated, according to CNET, that there were about 500,000 sales of the phone from 6 PM Friday through close of business Sunday. Based at least on their estimates total sales for that first weekend far exceeded expectations. PJ had suggested that 200,000 phones might be sold. 84% of the Apple stores still had product - although as mentioned above that is not true uniformly. Finally, PJ also suggests that at least in New York, Minneapolis and San Francisco 95% of the buyers purchased the larger model (8 gigs). From my discussions with my AT&T store on Saturday and the Apple Store on Sunday, that figure may not have held up in Sacramento but a majority of buyers wanted the larger model. The LA Times said this morning that most of the 1800 AT&T stores sold out by the end of the weekend.

One other comment - Apple offered two workshops in their Arden Fair store today - it was very helpful - about a hundred tips in about 45 minutes. The person who walked us through the "advanced" course was very good and had a lot of good ideas. The session seemed also to bring around a couple of customers. The bar with the iPhone seemed to have a lot of traffic around it.