You know, one of the things that peeves me about surveyors and poll takers is their seemingly endless quest to make their existence mean something.

It seems they take anything that’s in the news, pose some silly, often meaningless question to an insignificant sampling of innocent bystanders, then declare the results as if lives depended on them.

See, the funny thing about number gleaned from polls and surveys is that you can make them say anything you want.

For instance; take this latest survey done by Compete Inc. that suggests that few people would pay $500 for an iPhone. The survey consisted of 379 respondents of whom 1% said they’d pay 500 smackers for Apple’s promiseware phone.

Oh-Boy, oh-boy, OH-BOY!

You might think that 1% is a small number (and note that 1% of respondents is less than the 1% market share Steve Jobs said he was after in the first year of sales) and spells trouble for Apple’s quest to have 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 until you consider the fact that these are people who have yet to hold an iPhone in their hands, who have no clue, beyond what little info Apple has provided thus far, what the iPhone will do and won’t do, and are totally unaware and possibly don’t care what sort of peripherals there will be available for the iPhone when it shows up.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t make enough money to be so cavalier about 5 Benjamins, which means that this 1% is likely well-heeled enough not to sweat a loss of half a G. Taken in that context, if 1% of those who’ve only heard about iPhones said they will buy one, then I’d say those were pretty good numbers.

Another thing; we have no idea what questions were asked of the survey respondents. For instance, how would you respond if the surveyors posed the question this way; " Apple will be offering a new cellphone for $500; will you buy one?"

("A $500 cellphone? Yeah! Right!)

How would you respond to this question: "Apple has announced a device that is a combination of a widescreen 4 or 6 GB iPod, a state of the art cellphone, and an Internet device all in an ultra slim Apple designed package. The device will run a scaled down version of OS X, the OS that runs on current Macs and Macbooks, and the device is chock full of advanced technologies that make it not only easy to use, but a joy to use. Apple and Cingular will offer this new device for $500 with a 2 year Cingular contract. Would you buy one?"

("You say it runs OS X? hmm...")

The average Joe or Jill would likely scoff at coughing up so much dough for just a cellphone, but I’d bet they’d think about it some more if they believed they were getting a lot more than just a SLVR on steroids.

The media is just as guilty in distorting data. Unless we are editorializing, we aren’t suppose to let our biases seep into the news we report, but we do. We are human, after all, and it’s tough to write objectively about something you may feel strongly about.

Basically, what I’m saying is that all of this noise about the iPhone is just that, noise. Until we get an iPhone in our sweaty palms and play with the thing for a bit we can’t know if its even worth the box it ships in.

So, all of those polls and surveys...ignore them, or at least take them with a healthy helping of salt, because they mean little until more is known.

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.