So says John Paczshzchkowski at AllThingsD, and he should know, right? I mean, he works at Apple, doesn’t he? He has access to our sales figures, right? He’s getting cc’d on Tim Cook’s emails, right?
No, friends, John Paczshzchkowski doesn’t have any actual insight into how well or how poorly any product at Apple or any company is actually selling, but why should that stop him? This morning he was kind enough to point out that maybe people shouldn’t believe all the reports about the iPhone flopping in China, mostly because it’s way too expensive and it’s already easy to get a gray market iPhone for much less money.

Paz pointed out that all the bad reports were coming from a single store in Beijing and there are something like 8 million other stores selling iPhones in all of China’s 375 provinces, and God knows just because an expensive luxe product doesn’t sell well in the nation’s cosmopolitan capital is no indication that it won’t be a huge hit among the impoverished farmers in remote provinces, especially since there are loads of compelling farmer type apps that let these guys get weather reports and the price of corn or whatever, not to mention the one where you can blow into the microphone and make a Japanese girl’s skirt go up, and Wolfram Alpha, which is a bargain at $50 and is in huge demand among rural peoples in many parts of the world.

Or maybe not, because right after Paz posted this love note Reuters reported that, um, China Unicom has signed up a whopping 5,000 subscribers for the iPhone. Ahem. When that news broke, Paczshzchkowski hurried to save face by walking back his earlier story, though he still pointed out that fellow fanboy Herman Munster of Piper Jaffray remains confident that Apple will sell 1 to 2 million iPhones in China in 2010, which of course means we need to sell 2,700 to 5,400 units per day, and based on our current run rate of 1,500 units a day we should be able to do that, no problem. All we have to do is change the number of days in the year to 1,300 or so, and boom — we hit our number. No problem. Phil is already working on it with our APAC people.