Apple plays truant with AT&T
Apple’s attempt to stop iPhone’s from being unlocked doesn’t seem to be succeeding as it seems that iPhones are being purchased and unlocked all over the planet. Apple’s seems unable to keep the iPhone locked to AT&T, the telecom provider that pays Apple a handsome chunk of its service plan revenue.
There is a lot of buzz about missing iPhones being circulated all over the world. There is obviously an iPhone Bermuda Triangle somewhere. By the end of the last year Apple reported that it had sold 3.75 million iPhones but AT&T has recorded only around half of that, it has record of only 2 million iPhone subscribers. So the question now is, where did the other 1.75 million iPhones go? Even if you count out the 350,000 phones that have been sold through Apple’s European carriers, that’s still 1.40 million.
There is an explanation for all this. People really are desperate to lay their hands on an iPhone. An iPhone sells for $ 399 in the U.S but an unlocked one goes for as much as $ 700 on eBay. The thing with this is that though Apple is losing out on the revenue from AT&T, it is definitely selling almost double the number of phones this way. AT&T has a exclusive five year deal with Apple and it is definitely the one on the losing side with the rampant unlocking that’s going on.
Though Apple engineers keep coming up with technological changes in the iPhone that prevent it from being unlocked such changes never last long. The iPhone keeps getting unlocked by someone or the other. So there has to be a long term solution against this in AT&T’s benefit. Or they might as well terminate their contract. Meanwhile, iPhone lovers in other parts of the world continue to make merry.
