22 thoughts on “Apple To Sell 3 Million iPhones By End of 2007”

  1. i wonder what impact the free iphone unlock will have on ATT’s numbers. my first thought is that it’s going to drive apple’s numbers higher, and ATT is going to get shafted, the question is to what degree.

  2. These talks about unlocking iPhone are so funny and ridiculous! Who are you gonna use instead of AT&T? T-Mobile? Options are close to non-existant. EDGE network sucks, but 3G is not that widespread. They had to make their choices… Design another phone for Verizon and have all that mess with supporting two different versions of the same thing? Verizon should go GSM, that’s all. There is a reason why GSM is THE standard in Europe…

  3. Nick asked how many ipods Apple expects to sell the December quarter. Last year the number was 21 million. They seem to be growing ipod sales at about 30% year over year, but with the current line-up (and the ipod touch), I suspect the number will be closer to 30 million (worldwide). Two million in the US is doable, plus some in Europe.

  4. @buster,

    I don’t think the easy software unlock will have much impact on AT&T revenue: you still need a plan, and looking at costs between AT&T and T-Mobile (your only other choice in the US), it’s a wash, plus only AT&T gives you Visual Voicemail which is really quite good.

    However, international sales – through eBay / friends in the US / business trips / or picking one up on a holiday stopover – have started going through the roof, at least anecdotally amongst my tech-savvy circle.

    With a new iPhone and one of the easy to use (GUI) unlockers which came out this week, you can have it unlocked and on your local carrier (Telstra Australia in my case) within about 30 mins.

    Full EDGE support for Google Maps and everything.

    That’s a win-win for everyone really, especially Apple and its sales goals. AT&T won’t lose revenue (unless you count those $3000 international roaming bills!) because unlocked iPhones are primarily of interest to international users, and Apple gets extra sales now rather than only when they eventually roll out in that country (and those that aren’t the UK/France/Germay won’t get the iPhone for a very long time).

    And of course people around the planet – there are over 400 GSM carriers worldwide, covering everywhere from Australia to Zimbabwe – get access to the iPhone. Those people generally become even more ardent Apple supporters (at least my friends have) as a result, which is another win for Apple. More MacBook / iMac sales on the way!

    The unlock is a very good thing for the sales goal, and the worst thing Apple could do is reverse it – it would lose them these extra sales, create anger amongst the community (destroying the halo effect), and disrupt the rapidly building iPhone momentum.

  5. Visual Voicemail is just one of the services that Apple will roll out over time. They are in a unique position as a handset manufacturer as they either own or have co-located/developed some form of proxy server thats sits between AT&T Voicemail infrastructure and the iPhone. This also is the reason it takes a while to add a new carrier as there is a significant amount of integration work to support the ‘middleware’ that the iPhone needs.

    The disadvantage of course is Apple is pretty much locked into a single carrier partner per country.

    I don’t think people totally understand that unlocking an iPhone isn’t the same as removing a SIM lock on a standard GSM device. Apple specific features (like Visual Voicemail) aren’t going work unless you are subscribed to an Apple carrier partner. Apple will no doubt develop new features that run on this middleware platform and an unlocked iPhone won’t have access to these either; Combined with a firmware update that can break your unlock, I just don’t see the point.

  6. @sp

    The reason that GSM is THE standard in Europe is because governments of the largest countries decided it would be the standard. If Ericsson had invented CDMA instead of Qualcomm, then CDMA would be THE standard in Europe. Both GSM and CDMA have their pros and cons. Neither is definitively better than the other. Just as there is no CDMA in Europe, there is no GSM is Japan or Korea. Realistically, if you want to sell a mobile telephony product throughout the entire world, it will either have to come in both flavors or be a dual mode device.

  7. I feel that the IPhone should have access to many carriers and that would greatly increase the sales.Apple is constantly making new versions of things so it is hard to make a decision on what is best, if they are also making something better in the next month. I think they should make sure these phone will last a great deal then worry about sales.
