CrunchGear blogger Seth Porges thinks the iPhone will bomb, and he makes a good case for it, even if it seems counterintuitive at first.
“Will Bomb” is the exact quote from the blog post title. At first read, we immediately think of the buzz and anticipation that’s been steadily growing since January, how we’ve all been wowed by the coolness.
Yahoo’s Buzz Log shows that searchers are really curious about the price of the thing, especially since Apple started advertising them on TV. Searches for “iphone price” are up 108%.
Disappointment in how expensive it is, coupled with the painful two-year commitment, is up 1000%.
So my initial thought is, the buzz enough to float it to a success, but the price of coolness will be a major deterrent.
But Porges delineates what else he thinks will go wrong on launch:
…when the iPhone comes, Digg will likely be full of horror stories from the poor saps who camped out at their local AT&T store, only to find their purchase was buggier than a camp cabin.
The bugs include cracked screens from back-pocketed carry, delayed texting, and short battery life.
But what was most interesting about the predictions, was a reminder about how rushed it all seems:
So they set the release date as June 29 — a Friday, and the last weekday of the month. This, coupled with the fact that Apple has never, in recent memory, released a product on a Friday, should make everybody say “Hmmmm,” and suggests they took a calculated risk of releasing a product that might be a little buggy (probably about as bad as the first run of screen-flickering, case-cracking, motherboard-busted MacBooks), rather than suffer the embarrassment of not keeping their word.
And then you think back to a couple of other instances. Apple CEO Steve Jobs pulled the curtain on the project, quite conveniently, a week before LG unveiled a quite similar Prada-branded phone. LG won an award for that phone and called Apple a copycat. They didn’t even wait until they had the trademark issue worked out with Cisco.
Remember the Engadget leak? Apple may want you to forget it, especially since the jury’s still out about whether they’ll be investigated by the feds. A reporter who believed his source as solid as could be, quoting an internal email that made the rounds at Apple HQ convincing enough to fool even Apple employees as to its authenticity, dropped Apple stock into the depths upon being reported.
That internal email said the iPhone would be delayed. After a loss of $4 billion in market cap, Apple swore the email was a fake.
We’ll all be keeping tabs to see if Porges’ Prognostication comes true.
