Apple Said to Have Overstated iPhone Sales by 1.4M

The talk among Apple (AAPL) watchers today is Toni Sacconaghi’s dogged pursuit of the 4 million iPhones Steve Jobs claimed to have sold as of Jan. 15, the date of his Macworld keynote speech. AT&T (T), the iPhone’s exclusive U.S. carrier, reported yesterday that it had activated “just at or just slightly under 2 million” iPhones. That’s quite a discrepancy. Sacconaghi, Sanford Bernstein’s Apple specialist, did the math and concluded in a report to clients that there are roughly 1.4 million iPhones “missing in action,” either unlocked or sitting in inventory. Assuming that 20% of those iPhones were purchased to be unlocked (a generous assumption given that a jailbreak for the latest iPhone firmware was only released yesterday), he believes that there are at least 670,000 gathering dust somewhere — in warehouses, perhaps, or in closets, as unwanted Christmas presents waiting to be returned.
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/01/25/the-case-of-the-14-million-missing-iphones/?source=yahoo_quote