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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."
Does anyone else find it somewhat ironic that a company that has roots in defrauding Ma Bell is having these problems now?
ATT shareholders are the ones who should be paying attention.
25% of the affluent side of the market is willing to risk bricking a $400 phone to avoid their service.
How many more iPhones would have been sold if it was unlocked in the first place.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I have to assume the majority of the 250,000 were most likely blended.
I bought the iPhone the day it came out thinking I'd have the same reaction ("it's just a phone"). I then immediately took it on a multi-week vacation and used it every day. I found some features invaluable.
* The "real" web browser can be a lifesaver. I was able to conduct business as usual, accessing OWA, using PayPal, etc. No Blackberry-ized web.
* "Real" email is also a plus. Getting PDF attachments and actually seeing them rendered as they're supposed to be rendered helps.
* Visual voicemail was a great benefit on vacation. When you have 10-12 messages to go through, a day, seeing exactly who sent what and picking/choosing was a godsend.
* Video plays very well on it, and was a great benefit on 8-hour plane flights.
* Even "just as a phone", there's a number of features that it just does better than other phones. I never could recall, for example, the key combination to do 3-way calling on my Blackberry. On the iPhone it was just a couple of button presses.
It's still not perfect. If you receive a large attachment (e.g. a 1 MB+ JPG) it can error. I've seen the web browser crash a few times while playing music. Also, the screen is a fingerprint magnet.
That said, the same people complaining "What's so good about an iPhone?" are likely the same that complained years ago "What's so good about carrying around a cell phone?" Until you have one, using it every day, you don't realize how good beneficial it can be.
I can only hope that other manufacturers copy the design well enough that someone else can release a model at a lower price.
Some of us get paid lots of money to do that.