Well this sounds familiar. One blog's erroneous report caused Apple shares to fall today. The stock was down 7% after TheStreet.com published a story about cutbacks in iPhone production. [CNBC]

Mindy Bockstein, chairwoman and executive director of New York's Consumer Protection Board has taken time out of her busy schedule to write a heartfelt missive to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Among her complaints: Apple's iPhone return policies are too restrictive, and the battery has to be replaced by Apple technicians. "I encourage Apple to redesign the iPhone in order to provide for a replaceable battery," Bockstein instructs Jobs. Right, lady. When Steve Jobs takes design tips from a state bureaucrat, it will be a cold day in Cupertino. Says Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer: "Never mind police, health care, crime, mass transit, etc. — save us from not-quite-perfect $600 gadgets!"

Apparently, more schmucks than reported yesterday actually did buy iPhones; they just haven't been able to activate them. Shares of Apple rose 9 percent as investors realized that they could buy stock in a company whose customers were willing to spend $500 on a hunk of plastic that they were unable to even turn on. [NYT]

Apple's stock was up more than two bucks to close at $137.26 today, as the company gets set to report June-quarter earnings. Investors have recovered somewhat from the revelation that AT&T activated fewer iPhones in the last couple days of June than some on Wall Street hoped for. With only two days of sales, no one expects the iPhone to contribute much to sales. MarketWatch states the obvious: Mac and iPod sales will make up for most of Apple's sales for the quarter, which analysts think will come in at around $5.2 billion. Nonetheless, the cell phone, as Apple's big growth opportunity, will be the focus of everyone's attention. I covered the call live, blogging the highlights here. On the call: CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook. CEO Steve Jobs usually doesn't show for these things, and he didn't tune in for this one, either, even with all the iPhone buzz.

Yesterday we mentioned how our ignorance of finance had shielded us from the knowledge that the country was experiencing some kind of credit crisis; this morning, that knowledge is unavoidable. Most of the major papers front the news that markets are in trouble, as even mortgage companies that made "good" loans are seeing slow payments and defaults. The S&P dropped 2 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average lost 226 points. Among the firms in trouble? Apple Inc., which lost 6 percent of its value after revelations that iPhone sales were weaker than expected.

TheStreet.com is reporting that AT&T is paying unusually large fees to Apple in exchange for the right to sell the iPhone. The totals? $150 to $200 per phone, plus a $9 per user per month cut of the service fees. The upfront commission, which you can also think of as a discount on the true cost of the phone, is common in the industry and widely predicted; sharing service-fee revenue is something new. For Apple, which already plans to account for its iPhone hardware revenues evenly over the 24 months after a sale, this means that iPhone sales will juice revenues even more than expected. And for AT&T? It's getting a lot of high-tech, early adopter customers who wouldn't have gone to the carrier otherwise, but at the cost of setting a revenue-sharing precedent that will ruffle feathers in the wireless industry. Steve Jobs strikes a hard bargain.

Last week Page Six somewhat vaingloriously proclaimed that they knew where the latest "celebrity sanctuary" was but, of course they weren't going to tell us if we didn't already know. Well, Richard "Dicky J" Johnson, we already know. As Down By The Hipster relays, the bar is cleverly called Upstairs— and it's in the most unlikely of places.

Apple shares are down more than 4 percent to $139.53 right now. And why? Because AT&T has revealed that it only activated 146,000 iPhones in the last two days of the second quarter. Analysts, ludicrously, had expected 500,000, a number seemingly plucked out of thin air. Consider that Apple only has 160 U.S. stores, and consider that, while flagship stores like Apple's Stockton Street palace in San Francisco got as many as 750 iPhones for the Friday, June 29, launch, smaller stores got a much smaller supply. Consider that some of AT&T's 1,800 U.S. stores got as few as 15 iPhones. Even selling their entire stock as fast as they could, could Apple and AT&T's retail outlets really have moved many more phones than they had? (Photo by Dan_H)

Now that Harry Potter fever has overshadowed the hype bestowed upon Apple's highly hackable iPhone, we've had time to sit and wonder: Does anyone out there work for a company that is willing to reimburse you for the fraud-prone PDA-cell? We're going with: No. Even better, who do you know that went out and dropped basically $700 (or $1000, really, after cancellation of their previous service) on a soon-to-be-obsolete gadget with poor service and major security flaws? We're asking you to rat out your co-workers here, particularly if you work in sexy industries like media. Did Vogue editrix Anna Wintour have an assistant shell out for the delicate device? Does Timesman Bill Keller bark orders to subordinates demanding shorter stories on the crackable cell? Drop us a line and we'll share it with the world.

Hate to say it, but Jason Calacanis had it right: NYT gadget reviewer David Pogue's "iPhone: The Musical" was a trite, derivative, and boring piece of Apple propaganda. But a group of San Francisco webheads have come up with a pitch-perfect take on the iPhone phenomenon. Behold the glory that is "Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?" — and after the jump, my take on why this spoof gets it right while Pogue's flopped.

You'd think that people would be getting sick of reading about Apple's new iPhone. Or at least that jaded hacks would tire of writing about it. But no. The Apple 2.0 blog reports that the volume of news coverage about the iPhone has nearly doubled since iDay. A chart by Blackfriars Communications, a research firm, shows that from June 29, the day the iPhone launched, to July 8, when it peaked at 22,605 stories. In one day. Even now, Google News is still reporting more than 20,000 daily stories mentioning the iPhone. Add, to that staggering total, this one.

Wi-Fi outages at Duke University blamed on the number of iPhones trying to connect to the campus network. [Apple 2.0]

The irascible photographer is okay with censorship if someone is policing his children for him. "I thought Apple was doing some basic screening and nothing too dangerous would get on there," he writes in a comment about a video featuring his son Jackson playing with an iPhone. That's a change in pace from his usual stance when he charges Flickr, the photo-sharing site with which his also-ran copycat Zooomr ostensibly competes, with censorship.

Smug and pushy iPhone owners might end up doing something useful. Planned Valley-wide wireless coverage is being expedited due to complaints from early adopters. [San Jose Mercury News]

Here's the poll they're running over at the "Today Show"'s website this morning. It's a good question, although it seems a little too vaguely-worded to result in a real scientific measurement of the country's level of concern. We've come up with our own survey; please let us know how you feel.

Um, as long as you continue to cover her, probably not.

If you're the kind of status-obsessed schmuck who needs to drop $600 on an item that will be obsolete within a year, you'll still need to burn that cash: Apple is not coming out with an iPhone Nano, contrary to rumors. [Sydney Morning Herald]

Watch what happens when a $600 phone meets the smoothie setting. [Will It Blend]

Flash! Copy-paste! iChat! A blogger has republished a forum post claiming that these features and more are coming soon to the iPhone. Some will arrive with the release of Apple's new operating system, OS X Leopard, some earlier. But my money says this list is bull. Promised features include:

One can now encase one's iPhone in totally-straight seeming Swarovski crystals inlaid into a pattern of Albrecht Durer's praying hands. [Crystalicing]