Analyst outfit GfK showed that on the launch weekend for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 plus unit sales in 12 European countries plus Japan, China, Taiwan and Australia were down 25 percent.

While the figures are no surprise to us, it appears that they caught the Tame Apple Press on the hop and Forbes Jay Somaney issued an embarrassing, factless, childish rant claiming that no one had ever heard of the GfK and the figures were made up, Apple was great and Samsung smelt of Wii.

“Of course, it does not take a genius to assume that there was a lot of money made by the mysterious client or by other entities that might have been involved with the client (client was short Apple, the markets or the Apple supply chain or pretty much every stock out there) by releasing the “research” undertaken by GfK. Did any of you ever hear of GfK prior to yesterday?”

Somaney should have asked around the office before he defamed the analyst firm which has existed since the 1930s and is used a lot by Forbes hacks to compile their business reports and ordinarly news stories.

For what it is worth GfK was not the only one who noted that sales were down on last year. KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the prophesied slump in iPhone sales was coming, and there is no stopping it.

Kuo improved his estimates of the total sales for the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus thanks to the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 hysteria but said that sales of the iPhone 7 would be much lower than the iPhone 6 and 6S.