In iPhone-Sales Tizzy, Price Cut Minimized

Then along came this Monday and out came a release from Apple: They had sold that millionth phone. And that, my friends, is when the business media, God bless their gullible little hearts, kicked into gear. All the possible troubling long-term issues brought to the fore by the price decrease? Don't sweat it, dudes. They sold the millionth phone ... which, uh, they already said they were about to do. But break out the bubbly!

Said the Financial Times in a headline: "Apple quells new gadget sales fears."

Motley Fool got all cool: "A Cool Million for Apple," they wrote in their headline, before filling it out in a hyperventilating lead:

Well, that didn't take long. Not even a week after cutting the price of the device by $200, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) this morning announced that it has sold its millionth iPhone. Time elapsed: 74 days.

Naturally, Apple is ecstatic. Quoting CEO Steve Jobs from a statement issued this morning: "It took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod. We can't wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season."

Investors believe that Apple will; they bid up the shares more than 2% higher in early trading.

For the record, I also believe the iPhone will be a runaway success.

So is the issue of where the price cut leaves Apple dead? Not on your Nano.

The price cut called into question whether the iPhone's sales were slowing in recent weeks. Hitting the million-sold mark does not dispel this. Could Jobs have been facing the realization in the past few weeks that he could not match his 2008 goal of selling 10 million iPhones without a price cut the size of Bolivia? Quite possibly.

And while I do believe they would have hit the 1 million mark without the price cut, all this talk about hitting it in 74 days could have been affected somewhat by the price cut. And as the "BreakingViews" column in The Wall Street Journal smartly pointed out, Jobs, who has a history of toying with expectations, always aims to beat.