Spin on iPad sales figures is dizzying

The opening weekend box office for the iPad was certainly impressive. Unless it was very disappointing. That's all anyone can figure from the press coverage. That coverage was all built around Apple's announcement that more than 300,000 of the fetish idols had been sold as of midnight on Saturday, April 3.

This was clearly a huge failure and an embarrassment to the company because four of six major analysts thought it would be at least 100K more. (Hopefully the other two analysts are now getting raises. Or a free iPad.) The best prediction has to go to Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray. Munster guessed right prior to the thing going on sale but then -- forgetting that the plural of anecdote is not data – said sales would be in the 600K+ range after seeing the size of the launch-day crowds. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPS.

The gap between reality and prediction allowed the anti-iPadders to declare it a failure because sales didn't match expectations. (Jeff Jarvis has returned his! So that's one down.) However the anti crowd is relatively small at this point, especially compared to the iPad gushers. (BTW, I fully expect the number of iPad bashers to reach a million by Friday morning based on some numbers I just pulled out of my [expletive deleted].)

A company called iSuppli says more than seven million iPads will be sold by the end of the year and 20 million will be sold by the end of 2012. Gosh, I hope they have a better source for their numbers than I do. And speaking of numbers that probably aren't worth the electrons they were emailed on: A company called Attensity said 87% of Tweets about iPad showed an intent to purchase. So what do we know now? Apple will sell a lot of iPads because a lot of people are saying they will buy an iPad. Forgive me if I do not stop the presses on this one.

The best part of all this alleged news is the original source for the sales figures: Apple. The company says it has sold a lot of its hot new product. And this was verified by … who? While I have no reason to doubt Apple's numbers I also have no reason to believe them. The one source for the data has the most vested interest possible. There's another phrase for single source articles: Press releases.

My hat's off to Apple's PR.