Hey, Oxford--'splain this

"Elmo P. Shagnasty" <[email protected]> wrote in news:elmop-
[email protected]:

> HOW MANY iPhones were supposed to be alive and kicking by year end?
>
> - - -
>
> http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-985...?tag=nefd.blgs
>
> Report: iPhones piling up at AT&T stores
> Posted by Tom Krazit
>
> Is demand for the iPhone in America already starting to wane?
>
> AT&T, the exclusive American carrier of the iPhone, activated just
> 900,000 iPhones during the fourth quarter, the company revealed during
> its earnings conference call Thursday. It wrapped up the year with "just
> at or slightly under 2 million iPhone customers," according to company
> executives.
>
>

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

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 bull**** me about sales overseas. These numbers are for AMERICAN
sales...only.

---

› See More: Hey, Oxford--'splain this

On 2008-01-24, larry <[email protected]> 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 bull**** 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

Dennis Ferguson wrote:

<snip>

> 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.

I guess they thought the revenue sharing money outweighed the increased
sales volumes they would get by selling it unlocked. Maybe this is true,
but since it would have been relatively easy for them to just do several
different versions of the product for different systems (CDMA, GSM,
PDC), they really could have increased the volumes by a significant
amount by marketing to all the world's subscribers.

Now they've made it much harder to unlock, which will further cut into
sales. I guess they assumed that if buyers couldn't get an unlocked
version that they'd go to AT&T or Apple and sign up for a 2 year
contract when they buy the locked version, but it doesn't appear to be
working this way. Now they're stuck with all these deals with carriers
and it's too late.

OTOH, the reason for the sales downturn could be more related to people
waiting for the 3G model, which an AT&T executive stated would arrive in
2008. Could also be now that all the early adopters and Apple
enthusiasts have bought them, the current target customers are a lot
more objective about evaluating features and capabilities and are
balking at certain aspects of the design, such as the inability to do
have a spare battery (or replace it yourself), the lack of voice
dialing, lack of 3G, no GPS etc., that will no doubt be present in the
next revision.

Dennis Ferguson <[email protected]> wrote in
news:[email protected]:

> There's a whole lot of unlocked phones out there

Then there must be a whole lot more really stupid people than I imagine who
would spend up to $500 on a device you have to redesign yourself to do what
hundreds to thousands of OTHER, much cheaper, devices take for granted and
do quite willingly.

I don't think it washes. But, then, there are thousands of people who gave
Apple an extra thousand or two for a cute computer you didn't really
control that had a mouse with one button, so you may be right.

The WebTV lives on....in many pockets.

There's some really neat social science going on in this marketing scheme
I'm sure they'll be studying at great length (as long as the funding holds
up) for many decades to come....

I think the fascination with branded sneakers is a very similar social
science project.

Amazing....

SMS <[email protected]> wrote in news:47994a69$0$84168
[email protected]:

> such as the inability to do
> have a spare battery (or replace it yourself)

I don't think the bureaucracy at Apple thinks this means anything. The new
Mac Air doesn't have a DVD burner or a changeable battery pack, either.

Apple and some very powerful media interests are, once again like they
tried years ago, to move computer users away from this independently
operating machine "they", the men behind the curtain, cannot
control....into the Java-based, Java-like WebTV appliance that is supposed
to become the next enslaving billboard, not in your living rooms like TV,
but in your pocket, you car, and the other places in your life....even your
office.

Unlike the computing public of the 1980's and 90's when server-based,
corporation-controlled computing was totally rejected by a suspicious user
base, the public, dumbed down by the government school system's agenda,
seems ready to become the victims of a corporate-controlled, sell-it-to-me-
by-the-month system, now.

It's a damned shame what even the brighter bulbs in the box have now
become....slaves to that corporation control.

Think this is bull****? Turn off an iPhone's access to the corporations
and see what it does......almost nothing.

Even the dumbest PDA still "works" without access.....not any more.