Harry Potter pulls ahead of iPhone in news stories, iPhone stocks excellent

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Harry Potter stories pulled ahead of iPhone stories this morning, with both topics besting the 20,000 mark. The iPhone as a story seems to be losing some steam in the absence of new news, although that may change in the coming week when Apple releases its third quarter earnings -- the #1 story today continued to be the fact that the well-publicized Duke network problems were because of a Cisco network problem, not an iPhone one.



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iPhone availability is excellent, with only two Apple Stores showing iPhones out of stock. I can personally vouch for the fact that the Burlington, MA Apple Store had iPhones readily available. While iPhones were drawing crowds, the crowds were no worse there than in other areas of the store. I did verify that the Blackfriars iPhone availability map displays just fine on the iPhone itself -- no surprise, but it was nice to see.

The Apple Genius we visited was cheerful and helpful in replacing our defective MacBook hard drive; he simply asked if I had 20 minutes to do the appropriate OS install on it. I said sure and 20 minutes later, my son's MacBook was all ready to be returned to him. In the process, I got to see the same Apple Genius help many other customers. Interestingly, I didn't see a single iPhone being returned or come in for service in the hour or so I was at the store. I think that may suggest that Gizmodo polls showing a third of iPhone buyers voting "I didn't like it so I took it back" isn't exactly representative of actual retail experience (although my one hour sample in one location is at least as unrepresentative as their poll).

Finally, I apologize for messing up the images in yesterday's posting. They were tagged as .jpg files, but in fact were .pngs. I'm working on my hope Power Mac instead of my laptop this weekend, so my workflow was off; those posting images should be correct now (and also shouldn't take nearly as long to load -- for some reason the PNGs were much larger).

Finally, if anyone is looking for a good and true iPhone laugh, go here. iPhone owners will relate.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Genius, Apple Store, Gizmodo, iPhone, iPhone availability, iPhone Buzz Index, iPhone returns