One in six iPhones being ‘unlocked,’ sold overseas
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 24, 2007 at 11:46am
Apple has said that almost one out of every six iPhones sold may have been unlocked to run on unauthorized wireless networks, surprising analysts who had estimated the problem wasn’t as widespread, notes Bloomberg News.
Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook said Monday that 250,000 of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones sold may have been bought by users with the intention of unlocking them, or modifying the device to work on a network other than AT&T’s. Customers who aren’t signing up with AT&T, Apple’s approved service provider in the U.S., are preventing the two companies from collecting monthly mobile-phone fees. Analysts had estimated that between 10,000 and 100,000 iPhones had been unlocked since Apple began selling the device in June.
“I did not think it was that much,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, told Bloomberg, describing the 250,000 figure as “huge.” He predicted earlier this month that as many as 100,000 users had unlocked the devices.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
