So Apple put out a press release Monday saying they'd sold more than 5 million iPhone 5 units in the three days since launch. Five million phones. In three days. And Wall Street's reaction was basically a shrug followed by a slap, because the number analysts had been throwing around beforehand was closer to 8 million, and the stock dipped on the news. Think about that for a second. A company moves five million units of a single product in a single weekend and the market treats it like a disappointment. I don't have a tidy explanation for that other than expectations have gotten completely unmoored from what "a lot of phones" actually looks like.
I didn't wait in line Friday, for what it's worth. I've got a coworker, Dana, who did the whole thing though, camped outside the store near Union Square from about 6am, got her phone around 9, and by Sunday night she was texting me a photo of the corner of it with a little silver scuff already showing through the black anodized edge. Not dropped, not scratched on concrete, just regular pocket-with-keys wear after two days. Turns out this is a whole thing right now, people posting side by side photos of brand new phones with nicks along the chamfered edge, and Apple hasn't said anything about it that I've seen. The finish looks incredible in the box and then it's the softest metal in your bag apparently. If you're getting one and you care about how it looks in a year, buy a case on day one, don't be like Dana.
The other thing going around this week, and I'll only touch this lightly because I guarantee every gadget blog on the internet is doing the full teardown on it, is the new Maps app. iOS 6 dropped Google's maps data for Apple's own, and the results have been rough in a lot of places. A friend of mine got sent to a spot nowhere near the address he typed in, out past some industrial road, and just turned around and pulled out his old phone instead. I'm not going to do the whole "look at this hilarious warped bridge" roundup because you've already seen six of those by now if you're anywhere near Twitter. I'll just say it's the first Apple software release in a while that felt like it shipped before it was ready, and that's a weird thing to type about a company that used to hold products back for years rather than ship something half baked.
None of this is really about whether the iPhone 5 is good, by the way, because it obviously is, it's just an iPhone, faster, lighter, taller screen, the usual. I'm still on my 4S and honestly don't feel a burning need to upgrade for another cycle. Maybe that's just me getting older about gadgets. I remember camping out for the original iPhone back in 2007 like it was a religious event, and now a new one comes out and my reaction is "cool, I'll get it whenever the contract's up." Some of that is definitely the phone being a known quantity now instead of a novelty, and some of it is that I'm just tired, it's been a long week, and the idea of standing in a line for anything sounds like a nightmare.
What I keep coming back to with the sales number is that this is the new normal for how these launches get covered. It's not "did the product sell well," it's "did it beat the number some analyst pulled out of the air in August." Apple could report literally the best consumer electronics launch weekend in history and it'll read as a letdown if it's a few million shy of somebody's spreadsheet. That's a strange incentive structure for a company to be operating under, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
Anyway. If your edges are already scuffed, a case fixes it, and if Maps sends you into a cornfield, that's apparently just where we are for a while.