On 2008-01-24, larry <noone@home.com> wrote:
> According to one of the financial blogs I read, recently, 1.7M iPHones are
> "missing" from ATT (never activated). They could be:
> Stolen - but I doubt it.
> Just listening to MP3 files - even more far fetched

I think the numbers are 3.7M iPhones sold by the end of last year, of
which 2M were activated on AT&T and no more than 400k were activated
in Europe (400k were expected, but I think O2 already leaked that
they missed their 200k expectation by 10,000). That still leaves
1.3M unaccounted for at the end of the year.

> or
>
> sitting in INVENTORY, unsold, just as I predicted.....which also accounts
> for other reports of PARTS ORDERS being cancelled or held off as iPhones
> pile up!
>
> Something in the numbers differentials doesn't add up. There can't be that
> MANY cracked iPHones, can there? Can that high a percentage of sales be
> going to Jailbreak hackers?.......NOT!
>
> Don't bullshit me about sales overseas. These numbers are for AMERICAN
> sales...only.

No, the number 3.7M is the total world-wide sales by the end of 2007.

There's a whole lot of unlocked phones out there, at least according
to my very unscientific sampling. Over the past few months I've seen
several in use in Hong Kong, two in China, two in Costa Rica, one in
Mexico and one in Tobago, and despite how that sounds I wasn't out
of the US for all that long. And I don't think any of those phones
was roaming. I think I agree with the article, however; even if you
assume a humungous 500k or 600k got unlocked (even though Apple, who
loses big bucks when people do that, has threatened to brick them at
the first possible opportunity) that still leaves 20% of all the phones
they built somewhere in the sales channel.

Apple really, really screwed the pooch on the sales model. The whole
US market is showing signs of moving towards a "pick the phone you
like from a phone vendor, then pick the network you like from a network
operator" model (the way many other places operate) and Apple could have
led that by just selling the damn phone and letting people do what they
want with it. If there's a half million people out there who like the
phone, but not the 4 holy plans at the 4 holy carriers paying kickbacks
to Apple in the 4 holy countries, enough that they were willing to buy a
potential brick to be free of the other constraints, there might have
been 10 times as many willing to take one that they could just buy and
use without Apple threatening them. Apple's hard carrier locks (they
are even more fascist than the carriers themselves) instead paddled
them upstream and away from that demand.

I was offered an iPhone free at work but a phone I can't travel with
is useless to me and I didn't want a new AT&T plan with a two year
contract when the phone service I have now suits me fine. I don't
think they screwed up the iPhone itself, there's a market for that,
but they really screwed up all the baggage they make you buy into
with it.

Dennis Ferguson