Update
The INQ may have been playing with sales figures but someone (cough!) may also have been bamboozled by zeros. Any fule with a calculator knows that 4,000,000/200=20,000. Our apologies, dear reader.

THE INQ has been playing with sales figures for the Iphone and it would appear that they're dropping off real fast. They seem to have fallen to a tenth of what pundits were quoting.

Observers took the total of 4 million units in 200 days quoted by St Jobs of Cupertino and came up with a figure of 200,000 units a day.

The company has just said it sold 2,315,000 units in Q4 2007. That looks good because it sold almost half that number in Q3 - 1,119,000. But if you think about it, Apple increased the number of its markets from one to four in Q4.

So in theory it should have sold 4 million in Q4 alone. Now we get to the interesting bit. The company gave a cumulative total of 1,389,000 to the end of Q3. If you add in Q4's figure, you get 3,704,000.

So we've got a missing 296,000. Let's say there's 14 days between 30^th December 2007 and the 200^th day.

That's a mere 21,142 units a day. Nothing near the 200,000 units figure which everybody was banding about.

And as the INQ has said before, Q4 is always a brilliant month for phone sales because of the Xmas period.

No wonder Apple's stock is being punished. µ