Tomorrow Apple will announce earnings figures for the second quarter. The fact that Mac sales showed healthy growth is irrelevant to most observers — it’s all about the iPhone, which went on sale over the last two days of the period in question. The company is thought to have sold 200,000-700,000 of the little beauties but will confirm the figure in its report, which Reuters should have here. If it’s not I’ll update the link to Bloomberg or some other source.

It’ll offer some good iPhone news to counter claims a flaw in its web browser can lead to the phone being hacked.

UPDATE: AT&T says it activated only 146,000 iPhones. As the company is Apple’s exclusive carrier in the States, that does not bode well. The news wiped about $7bn off the tech firm’s share value.

FINAL UPDATE: Apple says it sold 270,000 iPhones. Hmm… I know there were activation problems but they weren’t on that sort of a scale. That said it’s possible a lot of people bought their phones but only activated them the day after the second quarter ended. At least that’s the excuse I’m offering for the disparity.

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