It seems to me that the Wired article was written after the TechCrunch article in the same vein.
First Last.fm; now this. That makes 2 TechCrunch articles in 2 weeks that make some kind of big, unsubstantiated claim. For hits, perhaps. Maybe fake journalism is their new weekly feature.
This is a pretty awful standard of journalism. I'd expect much better from Wired.
I hate to wish bad things onto people, but that's a basic ethical fault that should be punished, because it decreases the credibility of the whole paper (and a newspaper with no credibility is worthless). Not saying he should be fired, but harshly reprimanded, definitely. Twisting the facts to make a story more sensational is very improper.
Wired has had embarrassingly low standards for a long time. They go for the "razor-cool, cutting-edge" appearance, which invariably fails because the cutting-edge people don't care about being supercool. That means that while Wired occasionally has a fascinating, relevant article, they more often have lame stories that try too hard.
I don't know if "razor-cool" is a description, since it makes no sense, but it sounds good to me.
Why would you expect better from Wired? Have you forgotten "Push" (what, was that 1994?)? "The Long Tail" (which turned out to be based on completely wrong estimates of Amazon's sales data)? MJD's qrpff sidebar (http://perl.plover.com/qrpff/)? The Cypherpunks cover with the guy with the big knife (was that 1992 or 1993)? The "End of Theory" lies about Norvig? Wired has always been about sensationalism, not meticulous accuracy, from the very beginning.
I can't tell if you bothered researching the facts or reading the article, but I would guess that you didn't based on your comment. So here it goes: the iPhone is free because that's largely what the Japanese are used to. Most of their phones are free and come with cheaper contracts. SoftBank making the iPhone cheaper = trying to increase the sales by making it comporable price-wise to other phones, but it doesn't say anything about whether the sales are low or not. In fact, based on the claims of the Japanese journalist, it would seem that the sales are fairly good considering the amount and quality of competition.
While I agree that it is reasonable to be skeptical of an article defending Apple from Apple Insider, a good comment would include criticism of the article itself rather than your strictly ad hom attack.
Seems like you didn't read the article. It's full of very specific facts and quotations. Sure it could all be fabricated, but that seems very unlikely given the lengths it goes to pick apart the original article.
I can only quote from my own limited experience... But I was in Tokyo recently and I noticed the iPhone was quite popular. Anecdotal naturally. But I was surprised when I read the wired article.
First Last.fm; now this. That makes 2 TechCrunch articles in 2 weeks that make some kind of big, unsubstantiated claim. For hits, perhaps. Maybe fake journalism is their new weekly feature.