“You Lose; Good Day, Sir” ⇥ tech.fortune.cnn.com

Prior to this past weekend’s iPhone launch, Seth Fiegerman reported for Mashable:

Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, expects Apple to sell 5 million to 6 million iPhones worldwide through Sunday, according to an investor note obtained by Mashable. Munster expects that Apple will sell about 2.5 million iPhone 5S devices and about 3 million iPhone 5C devices, with pre-orders accounting for 1 million of the latter.

The figure turned out to be 9 million iPhones sold, making Munster incorrect by a whopping margin of 80%.

So now he’s trying to dig himself out of the hole he created, as reported by Philip Elmer-Dewitt for Fortune:

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told Bloomberg TV that “sell in” for the iPhone 5C could be even higher — as high as 3.5 million — which would mean that only 5.5 million iPhones actually “sold through” to customers last weekend.

Isn’t it incredible how accurate Munster is if he arbitrarily subtracts 3.5 million from the reported sales? And it’s not like Munster has some sort of amazing source or connection which would lead him to believe this, as AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger explains:

He simply guessed wrong by a huge factor, and yet after the fact blamed Apple for his error. That’s far worse than simply acknowledging that his model was wrong and that Apple turned in surprising, unanticipated results.

Why anyone believes anything Gene Munster says is beyond my understanding. He’s earned (and I do mean earned) an “F” grade from PunditTracker, and he lives up to that grade nearly every time he makes a prediction. In the immortal words of another Gene — Gene Wilder — “You lose! Good day, sir.”