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Apple's iPhone Lines Don't Disappoint
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Silicon Valley Bureau Chief
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CNBC.com iPhone Release |
Outside this flagship Apple store in San Francisco, the line has stretched a few hundred deep consistently for the last several hours. Apple [AAPL
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] even offered free coffee and bagels for those here. A nice touch.
And from the moment the doors opened to the time of this filing (9:10aPDT), the door counter tells me 354 people have been let into the store to buy their iPhone 3GS. Not bad for two hours of operation!
Adam Jackson was first in line and he got here at 11pPDT last night for the honor. And while sales have been brisk and steady all morning long, the same can't be said of Apple's Fifth Ave. store in New York City where computer problems slowed sales and sign-ups for some customers.
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CNBC.com iPhone Release |
And they're spotlighting one of the key reasons for the near euphoria surrounding the iPhone, since it is more a platform than merely a smart phone. The Apple App store with its 50,000 applications and more than 1 billion downloads, trounces the competition.
Research in Motion [RIMM
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] for one reported last night as part of its earnings that its software download service had seen 15 million downloads so far.
But RIM did report some troubling developments for Apple investors. Not only did it sell nearly 8 million Blackberrys last quarter, but 80 percent were bought by non-business customers, and that's the heart of Apple's iPhone market. If Apple were able to report that 80 percent of its iPhone sales went to the enterprise, that would gargantuan news. So the RIM announcement is significant.
Still, RBC and Piper both project a half million iPhone 3GS handsets to sell this weekend, about half as many 3G's that sold a year ago in its first weekend out, but still a blockbuster product.
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CNBC.com Line outside of Apple Store |
That's the kind of thing investors like to hear. Now the pressure's on Apple - and AT&T [T
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] - to come up with a way to keep this momentum going.
Questions? Comments?
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