The iPhone is drawing scepticism and hyped expectations at a ration of about 1:2… Credit Suisse has come to the party with analyst Rob Semple predicting that Apple will sell 5 million iPhones this year and 15 million next year, which is ahead of Apple’s own predictions. “We expect Apple to capitalize on the evolving trend of middle market consumers paying significant premiums for “New Luxury” goods, thus yielding a new supply-demand dynamic where higher prices are coupled with higher volumes,” he says…effectively arguing that the high price of the iPhone will work in Apple’s favor. He goes on to make claims about the “technological superiority” and “unprecedented functionality” of the iPhone, which are pretty premature considering no independent person has got their hands on one yet.

Finally, “We believe the Mac OS is the great differentiator in the iPhone, establishing an entirely new set of features and capabilities unavailable to current mobile phone customers today owing to the poor quality of existing OS’s.” Once again, it’s not immediately clear what features and capabilities will be introduced by the Mac OS. While the album-flipping music finding feature is pretty cool, Apple actually received flak when it gave the impression it wasn’t going to allow third-party applications on the iPhone, which would seriously reduce the relative functionality of the gadget. Apple has since relented, with Jobs saying that the company is actively finding a way to allow third-party apps, which was welcomed by developers for Apple platforms—MacWorld had a pretty comprehensive article on that.