I wouldn't be surprised if there were a million unlocked iPhones. Way more unlocked iPhones in the rest of the world than in the US.

I also wonder if AT&T is taking into account the pre-paid service that a lot of people have on the iPhone.

Are returned iPhones subtracted from the total count? I know a LOT of people who've returned them...

It's no problem if you take on consideration all of the people that bought an iphone to either have it activated ilegally with another carrier, or using outside the US, like some friends of mine did here in Mexico.

My sister has an iPhone, so check that one off as being accounted for.

I have a 4GB sitting on my bookshelf untouched. Can't vouch for the other 1.699999 million phones out there...

...make that 1.699998. Didn't activate my other one the "traditional" way.

Since the dollar has crashed, I have noticed that European tourists love buying iPhones here to take back to Europe. Not 1.7 million, but probably a big chunk. Some friends told me that lots of people had two or three iPhones with them on their way from DC to Rome.

people in japan were paying more than twice the retail price for them when they first came out here. they would just use them for all the other stuff aside from the phone part.

Dual use technology perhaps?

@arsenal4:

...make that 1.699997. I have a friend who bought one, but wants to wait until his current plan expires before activating it.

I hate it when people feign surprise about this. When the first million were sold, only half of them were activated. And that was back when you couldn't find them in stores and there was a 2-4 week wait on apple.com. So that's at least half a million that were sold on ebay to some rich kid in japan. Add to that, the fact that if you buy one, odds are you're enough of a fan to know how to jailbreak and unlock it.

it depends on where the sales numbers come from. apple probably considers "shipped units" as sold, even if they are sitting in a retailer's warehouse. that would account for the difference in numbers.

So to clarify, is Apple reporting shipped units or sold units? Sloppy journalism is confusing the terms, though they tend to do this all the time with other tech goodies.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to find that AT&T weren't being wholly truthful about how many have been activated. There's a bit of a feud going on between Stevie boy and Phonezilla, what with Jobbs effectively pre-announcing the iPhone Redux with real 3G and extra magic coming Real Soon Now as punishment for some transgression on AT&Ts part (I forget what it was, which is annoying me), it wouldn't surprise me at all if AT&T wasn't really searching as hard as they might be to find activations to report. No sense in making it look more successful than it needs to, it's not their baby, they've already got all the exclusive they're going to anyway.

Steve has made it clear in the past that he regards cell carriers as being essentially a commodity, he doesn't see them as relevant, they just provide the network. Only reason he got in bed with Ma Bell was to get proper support for the visual voicemail and a stable launch network.

In my humble opinion anyway.

My buddy has an iPhone with AT&T and likes it. So he bought his fiance one and unlocked it so she can use it on t-mobile since her sidekick blows. She used it maybe a week and complained of it dropping calls due to the touch screen hitting her cheek. It now sits under her bed gathering dust and he is out the $300 or so he spent on it.

I just laugh....

Iphones do blend.
[www.youtube.com]

Make that one more. Actually I've had quite a few iPhones and only one was activated with the NSA, and that was for a short period of time (a few days until George Hotz's hardware unlock came out).

@socalrob:

That's odd, since the touchscreen is disabled in such a circumstance.

AT&T sucks so where do you think these phones are being activated. I hate AT&T crappy service, I am just waiting for a good excuse to cancel my DSL besides the sometimes slow connections

I think they're in a warehouse somewhere, waiting to be collected by people who click on those banner ads.

Consumers want the iPhone unlocked, Apple didn't listen. Consumers still got their way. If Apple sold the iPhone unlocked they'd sold 15-20 million by now.

I think they said they had 2 million I phone customers... So that could mean accounts... not sure though, but thats what they said on the call.

@youbastid: iPhones aren't selling well overseas because theyre not 3G, so theyre probably arent that many unlocked ones either.

@NoWin: Why would he do that? It's not like they're running out. It's a technology item, it's bound to be outdated whenever he starts using it. Why not just wait until he's ready for it?

My co-worker bought 6 iphones in a period of six months and took them all the thailand in December to give out to her family and friends. So at least six iphones are unlocked in Thailand.

@mixerfx: It's not illegal to unlock a cell phone to use it with another carrier, according to current DMCA exemptions.

A work friend of mine told me he sees more people using iPhones in China than he does in the United States. Obviously take that with a grain of salt, but it just goes to show how huge the unlocking market is.

I've got them all. My coffee table lost a leg, so I used a few of them to hold up that corner. Then I got a few more in a stack to hold up some books on the shelf and, well, things just got out of hand.

I'll give 'em back. Very sorry.

@rmontcal: so does my sister - that's one more

was i the only one who seen the iphone more as an ipda? its a pda advertised as a phone.

AT&T (like all other hardware and software manufactures)has an extensive distribution channel that includes, resellers, wholesale distributors and online distribution. As well, each of these can possibly sell nationally and internationally. For those working for large companies, how many of you know what your cahnnel numbers are at any given time? Let's forget that the almighty wizard who reported this crap to begin with is someone "outside" of AT&T calling in for "financial" imformation...let's get real. Anyone want to tell me there bank balances and purchase plans? How about your wife/husband's or girfriend/boyfriend's? It is easy to account for all the phones that are "posted" to Apple's books. And let's not forget, a sale is just that...one sold item. Once it is sold, who gives a rats @#$% where it is? Jesus! Does any other company get this kind of microscope???? How about "micro" soft? Anti-trust violations galore...I don't see anyone asking them to account for their XBox numbers!

Do you have to activate the iPhone? Can you buy one, put your AT&T sim chip in there, and go? What's "activation" do? I use iTunes every day. But I don't have an iPod. And I don't use the iTunes store. I use it to manage the several thousand MP3s I've ripped from CDs i already own. So I didn't register. Is there a reason to "activate" your phone?

@socalrob: The Iphone's display shuts off when you are talking. Your friend is a sap.

Judging by the number of posts to Hackint0sh's iPhone forums, I'd say a huge huge huge number of the newer phones (>week 45) are sitting in wait for a software unlock; there are numerous individual posters who mentioned numbers in the 50+ range that they were working on hardware unlocking ... the 1/3rd estimate doesn't seem that off base to me.

erm, I think the other million of iPhones are circulating in the global market where proper retail versions of iPhones are not out. I'm from Hong Kong, but study in US right now and bought my friend in HK an iPhone upon his request and brought it back there.

My point is, the other million is imported to other countries and probably being cracked outside of US and UK.

Considering how big are the markets in China, Russia, India, the rest of Asia and Latin America, a million or so "missing" iPhones doesn't look like a lot.

@faust1200: At least we know where one of those missing iPhones went.

@xianzomby:

No, you cannot use a generic AT&T Sim - it needs to be a iPhone 'blessed' one.

My company has an iphone that isn't activated for displaying an after market accessory. And we just provided the material for the accessory. You would be surprised how many are used as expensive paper weights.

I know where they are! 1.7 million listings on EBAY!

there are a stack of them in australia - possibly not 1 million, but there are a few - a few thousand here, 10 thousand there - it all adds up.

Hmm.. What if someone bought an iphone, activated it, broke their iphone due to accident/abuse, then bought another iphone to replace it, and activated the new iphone under the old account? So it's possible ATT is counting unique account activations, both post-paid and pre-paid. And Apple is counting hardware units, but not counting the accounts tied to the phone. The remainder are probably unlocked phones that hit the grey market.

If your local supermarket sold 100 jars of peanut butter today, does it also mean they sold 100 jars of jelly and 100 loaves of bread? Of course not. This is just another lesson that we should take things with a grain of salt, when companies release "facts and figures" to the public.

There are also a lot of people in the US who travel back and forth Asia who brought phones to sell to people there who would pay a lot to get their hands on the iPhone.

On ebay and craigslist, I'm sure.

Also, remember that Apple gave their employees iPhones as well. That would attribute to about another 17k+ iPhones that either got sold on eBay, or activated by employees, along with sales in the UK, and unlocked phones - the numbers would somewhat add up.

I know about fifteen people in Canada with iPhones. I can imagine that the million missing iPhones have been activated by companies other than AT&T

Is this another case of them saying sold when its actually how many they have shipped to the retail channel?

Hey, I am in Australia and got a mate in GA to buy me three and ship them to me. Unlocking is a piece of cake and it costs me $45 per month from my Optus Cell carried to run. There is also a shop in Sydney that cells unlocked iPhones that work with any Australian SIM card.