Plenty of people are aware of what production targets for the iPhone are. Our sources work in the logistics chain for Apple. As noted by David Dennis in this section it is not a suprise nor really a criticism of Apple if production runs a little behind schedule.

I think our point in the article is that even without any lags in production we would surmise from the apparently controversial waiting lists that demand appears to be extremely strong for the iPhone. So any production snags no matter how small will serve to limit supply to an extent and increase the imbalance between demand (strong) and supply (limited initially).
You make a good point about our disparaing remarks hurting the credibility of the story and I believe on multiple posts we have said we would work to keep those types of comments out of future posts.

We appreciate your comments and hope you’ll give our surveys an opportunity to inform you. I beleive you’ll be surprised by the depth range and accuracy of them over time.

-Casey

To make the statement that “HonHai is having trouble manufacturing to schedule and is running behind” implies that you, and/or your staff, have knowledge what Honhai’s schedule is. You don’t.

Without actual knowledge of what proeduction numbers are, or the schedule Honhai is supposed to be producing to, any statement regarding production is nothing more than conjecture based on incomplete facts.

Your willingness to make such conjecture, as you did regarding the intelligence of those that followed Company policy, doesn’t generate any trust (on my part) in your ’surveys’.

Over a period of three years I have developed my own sources for channel information, and I can unequivocably state than no one outside of Apple’s inner circle has the information needed to make ‘production problem’ statements, and they never talk.

Unfortunately, from the point of view of the retailer, there is no way in the world they can call back all these nice customers, some of who may have even put down deposits, and tell them the waiting list is not valid. So now that there is a waiting list, there’s no way to put the cat back into the bag.

So I have no qualms about accepting the validity of the Channel Checkers’ research. The AT&T memo is evidence that there are waiting lists, and so calling around and asking about lists is a valid research tactic, and good, original reporting.

I’m posting this, in fact, mainly to confirm that I think we should appreciate people, even unknown ones, who look at something, figure out what it really means, and decide to do some original research. Isn’t the complaint the MSM has about blogs that they don’t do original research? Well, here we are, people who have, and we insult them instead of appreciating the work that went into this.

There was in fact an AT&T memo that implied that June 15th was a likely release date. However, this was not a promise from Apple and should not be interpreted as such. It seems fair to me that much work is still being done on the software and it would surely not be impossible for manufacturing problems to arise. I remember many new Apple products, such as the G5, that were promised around such and such a date, but actually appeared 2-4 weeks later.

I have no way of determining the channel checkers’ credentials or connections with suppliers, and it’s even possible that they have genuine connections but the contact doesn’t really know what he’s talking about in this instance.

In the end, the iPhone is not going to be judged on its release date, however exciting that may be right now. It will be judged on how much we, its customers, enjoy using it. I support a delay in its production if that will make it a better product in the end.

D

PS Any rumors on whether it will have a SSH client available, either natively or third party?

As for our source on the waiting lists we are 100% confident in those data points. As to the manufacturing delay, our only point was to highlight that only 10M devices might be available early on to meet the heavy demand as opposed to the 12M that some news sites have reported Apple is actually producing.
That said we appreciate the wordly advice. Since our data is predominatly field data that we gather we generally are unconcerned with corporate positions on information. Our data is verifiable and we track it. I would suggest that corporations will find our site informative about their own operations over time since we will undoubtedly be polling many of their line employees about basic things like “do you have a waiting list for the iphone?”.

We appreciate the information and the feedback and will take your advice to heart. Please comment more on coming stories.