AT&T Memo To The Troops: iPhone 3GS Best Seller Ever!

According to a recently leaked internal AT&T memo, June 19, termed "iLaunch day 2009," was AT&T's best sales day ever. That's funny. Wasn't the iPhone 3GS launched on the same day? Oooooooh.....Turns out Apple wasn't kidding when it said it sold over one million iPhone 3GS units on the weekend starting June 19. AT&T had said it had pre-sold hundreds of thousands of the new iPhones from Apple. Now, AT&T is congratulating its team for all the records that were smashed on June 19.

Here's the whole memo:

iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here's a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

• Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
• Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
• Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
• Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
• Largest order day in att.com history
• Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year's launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008's iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 -- all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008's launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

My thoughts on this are pretty simple. In 2007, the first iPhone cost $500 and $600 for the 4GB and 8GB models, respectively. Even though the iPhone 3G cost half that much ($200 and $300 for 8GB and 16GB models), the first weekend of sales saw massive activation delays. In fact, even though I was very close to the front of the line at my local Apple store, I waited for over 6 hours before walking out with a new phone, and even then it was still unactivated.

I think the botched activation process for the iPhone 3G launch slowed down the number of units sold the first day by a lot in 2008. It's little wonder, then, that things flowed a little bit smoother this year and AT&T's activation numbers improved.

Either way, if this is true, AT&T is surely proud of itself.