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Apple Says 250,000 iPhones Sold to Unlockers
Hugh Pickens writes "Timothy D. Cook, Chief Operating Officer at Apple, disclosed during Apple's conference call to discuss their fourth quarter earnings that they estimate 250,000 of the 1.4 Million iPhones that have been sold were bought by people intending to unlock the phone. 'The elasticity in demand with the price drop] enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around a million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people that have an intention to unlock and [while] we don't know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is there is probably 250,000 of the 1.4 million that we sold where people had bought them with the intention of doing that. Many of those happened after the price cut.' Apple knows how many iPhones have been sold and how many have been activated with ATT. The difference is the number that are unlocked."
From the article:
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I guess I'm one of many people that would be interested to see the numbers on the whole 'exclusive cingular deal' thing. I'm guessing there must be quite a hefty payment per unit by cingular to apple. Looking at these figures, apple were expecting 1 million sales at the end of Q4, and ended up with 25% more sales as a result of sales to unlockers, if they were expecting this then I'm guessing the payment per unit must be at least a third of the unit price.
I guess we'll know when it goes on sale in France (where due to law it must be sold unlocked). I assume they'll be whacking on the appropriate additional cost.
I also wonder why Apple really care? I mean they already signed the deal, and they're making 'reasonable' efforts to uphold their end of it, so why do they care enough about unlockers to bother with a patch aimed at preventing it? Esp. since they're getting more sales out of it....
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
From a business perspective, I understand the benefits of profit sharing especially when you have a lock on the market with your new product. However, when 18-20% of your market makes the active effort to purchase your product and create a workaround, I firmly believe that Apple could have printed their own money if they opened sales up to all companies that can handle a SIM card.
Being a T-Mobile customer, I wasn't an early adopter for the iPhone. I would have been if I was an AT&T customer, but having looked at it demographically I see this:
There are people who want an iPhone:
-And get it
-But have a different carrier
-And buy the hacked version for 90% of the functionality
-And can't justify the cost
-But won't pay the switching cost.
-But they really want a ZunePhone
.02
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and that would be me. :)
:)
:P)
:)
As a Canadian, I didn't have much choice. It was unlock it, or wait until Apple and Rogers get their act together.(Rogers is basically the only GSM carrier in canada. Fido is the other one, but it's owned by rogers now)
There's no light at the end of the tunnel for Canadians either. There are 2 hurdles currently slowing down the release of the iphone in Canada:
1) the iPhone name is already trademarked by a voip company called Comwave. I know this because I'm an iphone customer in more ways than one!
2) the data rates in Canada are insanely stupid. I don't even subscribe to data and just rely on wifi around the big cities to fulfill my data needs. The best deal I can get from Rogers is $10 for 10MB. After that, it's $0.03/KB. Yes, you can do the math. The 2nd 10MB will cost you another $300**. Now you know why I don't subscribe to data.
Going the unlock route might even make sense when indeed it does show up north of the border. You know they'll force you to subscribe to data, and you know they'll want a lock in for 2-3 years. So even if it was available in Canada now, I might still have unlocked an iphone anyhow.
Just my $0.02 CND. (And yes, it's actually worth more than your $USD now
** - Can someone double check for me, I'm still in disbelief at the $300 for the 2nd 10MB
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Here's another perspective (as opposed to the other one already extolled by another poster above):
I'm among the 250K iPhone buyers who bought to unlock. I, unfortunately, live in Canada, but the feature set appeared solid enough (and my iPod had the good grace to suddenly die on me) that I decided to make the jump. I don't regret it one bit and here is why:
- Full email access on the go is very nice. A Blackberry does this also, but very few other phones do. I've never realized how nice it is to have email access on the road - airline reservation number? No need to bring a sticky note, or anything else for that matter, it's all cached on the phone.
- The full web browser is a bigger feature than people give it credit for. I communicate heavily via forums, wiki, etc, for work, and being able to check these in a non-crippled (like a Blackberry, or every other phone really) phone is really, really, really nice.
- It is, in the end, just a phone and iPod slammed together. But it is also the nicest phone I've ever used, bar none. The interface is intuition, the buttons are easy to hit (which can't be said for Sony Ericsson phones, which used to be my favored brand - they have nice software, but poor physical UI).
- It's ridiculously nice not having to carry a phone AND an iPod. I tried this before with other music phones and I'd been disappointed each time. I was wary about this at first, having such problems with convergence devices before, but so far the iPhone has been a dream in that regard. The iPhone is the first "all in one" device I've used that doesn't suck.
I'm currently a Cingular customer, since 2004. So, I'm not under a contract, and I don't want to enter another in order to I buy a non-subsidized phone at full price. So, if I were to buy an iPhone, I would be fine with keeping my Cingular service, but I would use the activation hack. So, according to Apple, I'd be an unlocker as well?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
What about people who hacked their iPhones but are still on the ATT network? My boyfriend was already an AT&T customer when the iPhone came out and wanted one really badly... only to discover that because he was a corporate customer, he couldn't have one because the iPhone wasn't able to be activated for corporate accounts. Pretty lame really, at least from a PR standpoint. I mean, all these corporate customers hauling around iPhones is some of the best damned advertising a company could get!
Anyways, when the hacks started coming out, he bought an iPhone and did the hack so that he could use the phone with his corporate AT&T account. AT&T is getting their money, Apple got their money... and yet he's one of those quarter million phones that was bought to be hacked which is apparently bad. I wonder how these people fit into this discussion of hacked iPhones.
I tend to disagree. First off, it's not merely kickbacks, Apple gets a portion of the monthly fees during the contract. That is revenue for years after the initial product sale. Compare this to an ipod in which they only get their money for the initial sale. You can't think that Apple wasn't drooling over this. And, in fact, they took the same deal to the carriers in Europe. To the people that say they don't want to sign up for a contract for an unsubsidized phone, its actually kind of the reverse. Instead of the carrier using a portion of your fees to make the phone cheaper for you, they are using a portion of your fees to pay off Apple. I don't think the parent is right when he says that Apple's actions are going to our benefit.
There absolutely was specific demand for it. People were clamoring for it well before it was announced. You can even look at it as an evolution of the ipod and forecast the demand. There is no way that a company like Apple can't do the proper market research and figure that out. And, as mentioned, they are pulling the same tricks in Europe after they have tons of forecasting data to build upon.
Apple doesn't need carrier lock in for market penetration. Again, this is APPLE, not HTC or something like that. They have etablished marketing and distribution channels for consumer electronics.
For Apple, this is only about maximizing profit. They know the end user will pay and they know that AT&T will pay, so they're milking it. I think that AT&T only signed up as a defensive move.
Apple's locking is to benefit their bottom line and nothing else. They could have released it unlocked with no carrier tie in and they would have sold a lot more than they have now, but they wouldn't still be reaping the benefit for two years. I think the iPhone is a cool device and am still considering getting it, but I don't for a moment think that Apple cares about wireless freedom; they care about what's in my wallet.
Now, if you want to talk about the price cut tactic with regard to market penetration/share, I'm all with you.
The web browsing experience on my Apache and the Treo 700wx I had before it SUCK SHIT ALL DAY LONG, and the PDF viewing is worse. You don't have a single clue wtf you speak of. If I lived in an area serviced by GSM I'd have an iPhone in a split second.