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Apple Estimates 250K iPhones Purchased to Unlock

Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 6:15 PM - by

Apple estimates that some 250,000 of the 1.389 million iPhones sold through the September quarter were purchased with the intent of unlocking them. The comments came from Apple COO Tim Cook during the company's Q4 quarterly conference call with analysts.

During a discussion about the iPhone trajectory of sales, prior to and after the price cut, Mr. Cook said that he was very pleased with the price elasticity of the iPhone but declined to elaborate on the details of day to say to sales prior to and after the price cuts.

Immediately following, however, he did elaborate on the unlocking issue and said, "we were very happy with the elasticity that we saw. It enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around 1 million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people that have an intention to unlock and where we don't know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is that there were 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. We're not going to project precise numbers."

When asked if the iPhones purchased with the intention of being unlocked and not subscribed to the AT&T network were not eligible for payments from AT&T, Mr. Cook said, "That's correct. The payments on AT&T depend on being locked to AT&T, obviously."

The fact that nearly 20 percent of all iPhones that have been purchased so far were with the intention of being unlocked could explain the early reports of a discrepancy between Apple's iPhone shipments and those activated with AT&T in the early days after June 29th.

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A guest said: (hide)

Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:10 pm

"The fact that nearly 20 percent of all iPhones that have been purchased so far were with the intention of being unlocked could explain the early reports of a discrepancy between Apple's iPhone shipments and those activated with AT&T in the early days after June 29th."

Nah, he even implies the exact opposite, "Many of those happened after the price cut."

Most people, even very highly skilled technology professionals, would not buying a phone in the first hours of a device being available for the purpose of unlocking them. The people doing so are the ones who are going to be hacking the phone since that is the only way to unlock them. It is only after the hacking has proven unlocking to be successful and the development of a standard process that people start to buy the phone for unlocking purposes in any significant percentage of buyers. Until then, it's a big question mark if it is even possible to unlock a phone and use it on another carrier. But once firmware mods are developed and released, buyers who intend to do such things can now count on having that and will not look at the deficeincies of the device as made by the manufacturer as a drawback and will actually buy the device. Even still, the people who wanted to unlock the phone do not want to pay the 200 dollar premium put on the device at the launch. As the man said, unlockers started buy after the price drop and after they knew they could use the tools available for free on the web to do it successfully.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked , send him a message or view his profile

Tue Oct 23, 2007 12:31 am

Anonymous wrote:

Nah, he even implies the exact opposite, "Many of those happened after the price cut."

At last! A Guest who makes a lot of sense. We humans are story-tellers who look for causality, even where there is none. The "discrepancy" probably arose from many factors. Some of those MIGHT be:

- Some people waited to activate their iPhones;

- There were many reports of people having problems activating their iPhones with the ATT system;

- Some of the iPhones may have been gifts;

- Some people apparently attempted to activate their iPhones on ATT business accounts, which ATT would not allow;

and on and on. This habit of ascribing simple causes to complex events, especially a large collection of events, is very human, but also very irrational. Consider this example: the Federal Government issues a report showing that unemployment decreased, which should be a good sign for the economy. (I know, it's not that simple; humor me. ) The stock market (e.g., DJI) goes up. Obviously, according to the "pundits," it went up because investors had more confidence in the direction the economy is taking. Now, suppose that nothing changed, but the stock market went down, instead. Now, the pundits might say that investors were worried about inflation. In both cases, the pundits are able to find a post hoc "explanation" for contrary results. In both cases, they could not have predicted the stock market's direction. In a situation involving millions of transactions and millions of investors, large and small, it's patently absurd to ascribe the aggregate/average to some simple cause. (Psychology, especially Freudian psychoanalysis, has the same problem.) A rule of thumb: if some system can explain anything after the fact, but predict nothing, it's worth less than nothing--less because it gives the illusion of knowledge when there really isn't any.