The same Reuters/Ipsos poll Wednesday produced this matched set of headlines:
- Survey says 60% of US iPhone users not interested in Apple Watch (Digital Journal)
- Nearly 40% of iPhone owners interested in Apple Watch: Poll (Economic Times)
.
Confused? You’re not alone.
Alexei Oreskovic, who wrote the item on which both headlines were based, seems to have forgotten that he wrote nearly the same story last week.
That one began “Apple Inc’s new smartwatch may be a tough sell” and ran under this heavily punctuated — and much ridiculed — headline:
Exclusive: Apple Watch not on shopping list for 69% of Americans: Reuters poll
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, who can, in a knife fight, always be counted on to take Apple’s side, saw it this way:
One out of four respondents is interested in buying a brand new product — so new that none of them have seen one in person, and no one outside Apple has used it extensively — and Reuters’s conclusion is that Apple Watch “may be a tough sell”?
Here’s what’s going on: All of these stories are coming out of the same rolling polling data, graphed below, which Reuters is squeezing for every last page view.
Click to enlarge.
Not shown here are the responses of the subset of Americans who own iPhones, 17% of whom told pollsters they were “very interested” in buying the device. Also not shown are the 13% of Americans who said last week that they were considering buying an iPhone just so they could get the Watch.
Hmm. Maybe it’s not such a tough sell after all.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
