There’s contrarian and then there’s “someone get that guy’s car keys” contrarian. Here’s hoping BTIG’s Walter Piecyk has a designated driver.
APPLE GETS DOWNGRADED: BTIG Forecasts A Big Revenue Miss Later This Year
Uh, how’s that, Walter?
For Piecyk, it all boils down to the iPhone. As Business Insider summarizes, Piecyk believes “2012 will be the year that the wireless carriers fight back against having their margins constantly squeezed.”
What fight are you watching, Walter? How, exactly, are carriers supposed to get back into this bout? More Android phones?
No, Piecyk believes carriers will turn to the Windows Phone juggernaut.
Well, OK, crazy analyst guy. The Macalope supposes that’s possible, if maybe a little harder than you imagine. Over at Wired Christina Bonnington, having recently pimped sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Note, wants you to know that sales of the Nokia Lumia 900 are already super-duper!
Initial sales indicators for the Lumia 900, Nokia’s most important U.S. Windows Phone to date, are showing that the handset is off to a good start despite the fact the phone launched on Easter Sunday, a day when most AT&T stores were closed.
Wait, if most of the retail locations were closed until the day you wrote this piece, then how can you tell?
The Lumia 900 rose to the top of Amazon’s smartphone rankings today, beating out favorites like the Droid Razr Maxx, the previously most popular phone, and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. As of press time, the black Lumia 900 model holds the number one spot, and the cyan model holds the number two spot. Yesterday, the handset debuted in fifth place on the site.
The exact sales numbers that propelled the 900 to the top of Amazon’s leader board aren’t known at this time.
So… just to be clear, in your piece claiming that sales of the Lumia 900 are “promising,” you admit you have no idea how well it’s selling.
Well, maybe the Lumia 900 will sell well and change the fortune of Windows Phone, magically returning the carriers to the throne of whatever the country is in Game Of Thrones—look, the Macalope’s been meaning to watch it, he’s just a little busy and he doesn’t get HBO, OK?
All the hard evidence we currently have, though, continues to point to the fact that people want iPhones (which, incidentally, Amazon does not sell through its own wireless store, so it doesn’t appear in its rankings). Carriers like T-Mobile, which don’t have the iPhone, have been seeing their users flee like hipster rats from a sinking ship to a better ship, a ship that has the best-selling smartphone.
Apple’s third-quarter results will be out in July. The Macalope will set himself a tickler to remind him to come back to review this prognostication then.
Hee-hee!
Oops. Wrong kind of tickler.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]