How many iPhones were sold during the first 6 hrs?

It has been said that Apple stockpiled 3 million phones to go on sale when it launched the iPhone last Friday evening. To eager US customers Apple also provides a homepage to check item availability at their local Applestore. In any case, the iPhone went on sale at 164 Applestores and 1800 ATT stores nationwide.

Well informed market watchers estimate an average of 500 phones that went out the doors of the Applestores in the first six hours and about 50 for each of the ATT stores (remember, these numbers are averages).

Under these assumptions watchers estimate a total of 170K phones sold from 6pm to midnight last Friday. Some estimate the Applestore average output at 50% higher, thus putting the total number of phones sold above 200K. Not too bad for six hours sale, innit? At an everage of 550 USD per device, Apple must have cashed in the best part of 100M USD and ATT 5M USD in new subscriptions (assuming 50% conversions from past subscriptions).

All this is in line for selling 400K units in the first few days of availability. Jobs hoped to grab 1% of the worldwide market within 18 months from launch, that is 10M units. We'll see.

How about user experience? Most users experience non-stop orgasms and forgot all about their wives and girlfriends for the night whereas a small percentage (Reuters reported less than 10%) was too incompetent to get it up and running and many blame ATT for taking to long to activate the friggin' things. Apple launched earlier an update to iTunes to accomodate the new iPhone activation and set-up functionality and many probably were too anxious to get it going and couldn't wait for the update to be done and messed up the update and you know how it goes... Anyways, this is small glitches... we'll have to wait a few days to see how it all turns out in the real world with real users and not only moron geeks who are ready to forgive Apple for anything...

How about AAPL performance on Monday? My 2 cents worth: I believe the current value of the stock already has factored in the iPhone effect. The stock currently trades in the 120ies in line with analyst expectations. It is more likely that it will retreat after a few days of hype and will stay in the low 100ies by the third week in July, and this until Leopard gets launched in October and the iPhone has sold a few million units and gets launched in the rest of the world. After all, if they launched in Europe by year end as they promised they have got the opportunity to penetrate a 60% larger market than the US (490M inhabitants vs 300M in the US), and the euro trading for some time now 30% higher than the dollar (Apple typically sells its products in Europe a euro for a dollar). Certainly Europeans geek out slower than Americans, but, nevertheless the item will be a bestseller here as well as there, trust me.

My personal advice for AAPL then is to wait a bit and feel from where the wind blows. The summer has always been a peculiar season for stocks, at least for the last 20 years I am following the markets.