3 million iPhones ready to hit shelves on the 29th?

Apple may have finally announced the release date for the iPhone but don't count on the secretive company revealing how many units they'll have at launch anytime soon. Speculation has been all over the map but up until this point, pretty much everyone has agreed that Apple won't be able to produce nearly enough units to satiate customer demand. Business Week, however, has decided to go the contrarian route: in a recent article, Business Week's Peter Burrows claims that "[Apple] plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29," according to two unnamed sources. The analysts at Piper Jaffray seem pretty optimistic as well, claiming that Apple will have sold 45 million phones by 2009.

So who's right? Will there be 200,000 iPhones at launch or 4 million? My take on this is that nobody really knows--Apple doesn't give analysts special treatment, so it's quite likely that these guys are basing their speculation on the same information that we have. Still, if I were a betting man, I would guess that the number of iPhone on the 29th will be in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions. It can be quite difficult to produce an all-new piece of hardware like the iPhone and given the last minute tweaks that it seems like Apple has been making, it's unlikely that they'll have enough time for a serious production ramp up. We won't know for sure until the 29th, though if you really want an iPhone, you might want to start lining up now.

For more iPhone predictions:
- see this Business Week article
- and this article from macnn