Yokimbo

The NYTimes had an article today on AT&T’s recent earning report, which showed that AT&T and Apple didn’t sell as many iPhones as analysts had hoped for or originally reported.  Apple’s stock dropped a few percentage points today as a result. 

The NYT article has a couple of sentences that have me thinking (uh oh, duck).  For instance, I’m having a little trouble with this sentence, “AT&T said it signed up 146,000 iPhone customers, well below analyst estimates, which ran as high as 500,000 units.”  Signing people up and unit sales should be related but are not exactly the same.  What do they mean by signing up?

And what about this, “Like the bulk of the phone industry, AT&T is seeing a decline in its wireline business, and last quarter the company lost 193,000 consumer lines”?  If the bulk of the wireless phone (read cell phone) industry is losing customers, where the heck are they going?  Which carrier is taking them in?  Maybe these losing companies should focus more on keeping existing customers than buying other companies to secure new customers they’re just going to lose anyway.