Business media can't decide how iPhone sales are performing

TheStreet.com’s Marek Fuchs writes Friday that the business media has been all over the place when writing about how sales of Apple’s new iPhone have been in the first week on the market.

Fuchs wrote, “Apple’s iPhone is underselling expectations. That’s what I read. Actually, it’s overselling expectations. I read that, too. Wait. Turns out, it’s overselling stated expectations, but underselling whispered expectations. No, no, it’s hitting the whispered number, but a week later, possibly. That’s not right: It’s already activated the million that was the whispered number! Actually, it doesn’t even matter how it’s selling, because margins are rich. But margins don’t matter, either, because of some emerging iPhone partnerships in Europe. But margins must matter — because the European release is going to be limited.”

Later, he added, “Together, we’ve seen some fathomlessly bad coverage from the business media. But this one might take the fathomlessly bad cake.

“Forget about deciding whether the iPhone beat expectations. I think it might be easier to catch a moonbeam in a jar than figure out what expectations actually were. From Bloomberg, we are told that expectations were for 200,000 and then again 350,000.”

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