Photo: Andreas Pizsa on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Panic on the streets of, um, Cupertino over the weekend when someone realised that Apple had sold 3.75m iPhones - but AT&T said it had sold under 2m.
Then not so much panic, when the Americans remembered that a couple (OK, 350,000) have been sold in Europe. And, more alarmingly, that the rest are all being nobbled and used on other networks and in other countries.
Saul Hansell at the New York Times delved a bit deeper into this. He wasn't convinced that one million people would be iPhone obsessed enough to attempt the daunting task of hacking their brand new uber-gadget, until analysts told him there's a grey market of professional hackers buying them up, stripping them down and then reselling them abroad.
Apple makes an estimated $360 for each activated iPhone over its 18-month contract so, going by the analyst's estimates, that's an eye-watering 838,000 phones x $360 in lost revenues. That's $301m.
On the plus side for Apple - those same analysts say Apple is already making a healthy profit on iPhones at around $50 per handset, even without that share from the mobile operators.
Incidentally, stats I was sent by Gartner put Apple's share of the US smartphone market at 19.5%, selling 1.119m iPhones from July to September.
Source: New York Times
