Breakfast Links: iPhone sales, Rubber Ducks & Roswell
Art for Mondays.
It may come as no surprise that the iPhone sold pretty well this weekend. Official numbers from Apple don’t seem to be available but analysts are making their estimates known. Global Equities Research said that Apple sold around 200,000 phones in the first 24 hours - he makes the very specific statement that AT&T sold 72,000 while Apple sold an estimated 128,000. An analyst from Piper Jaffray said that Apple sold 500,000 the whole weekend. If that first guy is right on the first day’s numbers, I can’t believe they sold more than double the initial push on the second day, you know? Especially with AT&T pretty much sold out. Wierd - but it seems clear that Apple sold a hell of a lot.
This is pretty awesome - 15 years ago 29,000 rubber ducks (turtles and frogs) jumped ship in the middle of the Pacific en route from China to the US. A scientist, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, has spent his retirement tracking this fleet - which is easier to track than the floats they usually use since people are more likely to report a huge island of toys than a scientific float. These bad boys even got frozen in the artic and crossed it moving a mile a year. Craziness! They’re due to land on English beaches pretty soon now. There’s a map on that page that shows their incredible path.
And in a last bit of madness, the PR officer (Lieutenant Walter Haut) who made the press releases concerning Roswell so many years ago has passed away and he left a sworn affidavit (to be opened after his death) that all those press releases were cover stories and that he’d personally seen the wreckage of UFO’s as well as alien bodies. He talks about all sorts of other stuff like how they issued the press release because the locals were aware of the first crash site and they wanted to hide the fact that there was a second (more important) site. Who knows what’s true or not, but this’ll definitely rekindle some Roswell interest.
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:41 am
What I’d like to know is how many returns they get once people figure out they can’t sell it on eBay for a ridiculous profit.
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:53 am
Heh, this woman is thanking her lucky stars for that 1 iPhone per customer rule:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/ebayers-are-smarties/woman-wants-to-buy-100000-in-iphones-cant-274036.php
That lady was so smug going in first thinking she was going to buy up the store’s entire inventory! And then the kid she bought the spot from goes in a gets himself an iPhone with all the trimmings on that lady’s dime. So awesome.
There would have been some nice karmic retribution, though, if she’d been allowed to buy them all and then had to return them and pay some crazy restocking fee for each one. And even if she’d spent all her money, the store probably would still have had enough left for the rest of the line. :)
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
here is a link to someone who bought an iFone and then specifically disassembled it so that we would not do the same. want to know what goes into an iFone? check it - http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3026