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Apple press gets upset about Wired report

by on02 March 2009

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All lies it claims


Appleinsider
has turned itself into an organ of the Apple Marketing department by getting its knickers in a twist over a Wired report that dares to say that the iPhone might not be selling well in Japan.

AppleInsider claims that Wired's story about Japanese iPhone hate was “completely false” and has been edited at least twice so that must prove it. It claims that the report intending to portray the iPhone as "hated" in the Japanese market was built upon fake quotations from industry writers and observers who were misrepresented by remarks attributed to them that they never made. The Apple fanboys wade into the writer Brian X Chen who said that Apple's chum in Japan had to release some promotional pricing for the iPhone in Japan because it was going down like cold sick with Japanese punters.

Nobi Hayashi was a little slow in getting back with a quote for the story so Wired made a mistake of quoting what he said in 2007. Hayashi now says that he has changed his mind and now even owns an iPhone. He claimed that the iPhone was not such a big failure in Japan. Apparently the the perception of iPhone being a failure was created by a newspaper in Japan, Sankei Shimbun, which was based on wrong information. It is strongly believed that they have shipped more than 300,000 and possibly near 400,000 units in Japan.

However what AppleInsider did not point out is that even with 400,000 units flogged that is a tiny percentage of a 100,000,000 mobile market. Hayashi then goes on to say why the Japanese don't like Apple so much. SoftBank's Apple's exclusive mobile provider in Japan, was “not perfect” and has a few glitches, he said. The big one is wireless coverage is lower compared to NTT DoCoMo and KDDI and other two major carriers have access to 800 MHz frequency which the new comer SoftBank was not allowed to use. He added that Apples lack credibility from the older Japanese. There are so many NTT DoCoMo users who would never even bother to switch the operators because the company was originally the government owned Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, people just trust it by it.

SoftBank is a company run by Korean-Japanese businessman, Masayoshi Son, who the older generation told trust. There are also loads of rumours that Apple's chum is about to go bankrupt. Since AppleInsider could not make Hayashi disagree with the original premise that Japan does not like Apple much” it resorted to quoting a foreigner living in Japan who is an Apple fan boy. Like many Apple fanboys that plague the comments boxes of news sites the find one or two factual inaccuracies in a story to justify saying that a whole news story is wrong. It is fairly clear that while Japan might not hate the iPhone, it is not doing as well as other products. No amount of sticking your hands in your ears and going la la la is going to stop that being true.

Certainly you know that someone has lost their journalistic credibility when they say a news piece is “all lies”, particularly when you can see that a fair chunk of it was true.

More here.
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