Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Verizon’s iPhone Sales So Amazing They Can’t Even Put a Number On It

Verizon said on Friday that its pre-orders for the iPhone on Thursday marked the biggest launch in the company’s history, but decided to use lots of adjectives as opposed to quantifying the excitement.

“This was an exciting day,” Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead said in an oh-so-cheery statement. “In just our first two hours, we had already sold more phones than any first day launch in our history. And, when you consider these initial orders were placed between the hours of 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., it is an incredible success story. It is gratifying to know that our customers responded so enthusiastically to this exclusive offer–-designed to reward them for their loyalty.”

While Verizon declined to put a specific number on how many iPhones were allotted for pre-sales, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky estimated it was fewer than 100,000 units.

“Though the quantity of iPhones for the pre-order were very ‘limited,’ likely less than 100k, the stock out on the one day of pre-orders affirms the strong pent-up demand for the Verizon iPhone, and bodes well for initial sell-through,” Abramsky said in a research note on Friday.

For what it’s worth, the company didn’t sell out of whatever unspecified number of devices it had allotted for pre-order until 8 pm ET, although pre-sales were limited to existing Verizon customers. The device goes on sale broadly on Feb. 10 and will be at all company-run Verizon stores, Apple stores and Best Buy locations, as well as at select Wal-Mart stores and through the Verizon and Apple Web sites.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald