Since the day the iPhone has launched, a lot has been written about the device, its functions and its court cases ofcourse. This time it’s about sales. Apple has given its best to reduce the count of the iPhone-cracking. It seems the company along with AT&T couldn’t maintain its customers with the network. The gap between the locked and unlocked iPhone sales figures is consistently growing.
Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research mentioned that while Apple claimed to have sold 3.7 million iPhones. When he studied the actual activations through AT&T though, it was found that there are 1.7 million iPhones missing as only 2 million were officially activated.
350,000 units were sold by European carriers such as O2, Orange and T-Mobile.
So now you know that by ‘missing’ iPhones we do not mean that they were stolen, but are implying that though the handsets were purchased, they were never activated on the AT&T wireless networks carriers.
Now, the estimated sale figure of hacked or unlocked iPhone comes to 1.4 million. Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc, explained, “Some unknown number of iPhones are being unlocked by purchasers and some, probably a large number, are being unlocked for resale.â€
If the number of unlocked iPhones keeps increasing, it will surely affect Apple’s profit. It will be much lower than estimated.
