Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"AT&T has just reported their Q4 2010 financial results and it included another 4.1 million iPhone activations."

61% of their customers had the "integrated devices" which was up about 15% from the previous year. Integrated devices according to AT&T are the devices with a keyboard of some kind, either virtual or physical. The interesting quarter will be Q1 of 2011 after Verizon starts selling the iPhone.

"AT&T set a new record by activating 5.2 million iPhones in the US over summer of 2010. That's a huge number, especially considering that it activated 3.2 million iPhones in the spring. That's a soaring leap of 62.5 percent."

True, they activated 5.2 million iPhones, but only 24% were from new customers. Regardless, they did improve their customer base to 92.8 million customers so apparently they must be doing something right. If/when the Verizon iPhone is announced, I guess we will see just how happy that customer base is won't we?

"As usual, Steve Jobs began his Apple music event keynote today by giving a breakdown of iOS devices sold to date - 120,000,000. It took them from June 2007 to June 2010 to reach 100,000,000 and only 3 months to add another 20,000,000 on top of that. Jobs also said they're activating new devices at a rate of 230,000 a day."

A not too subtle jab at Google when Steve said "if we counted upgrades in our numbers they'd be way higher than 230,000." Google of course had a response to this which was "The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services." I guess Google and Jobs are interpreting data differently?

"Reports of trouble for AT&T's 3G network have done nothing to keep people from the iPhone in the U.S."

Yesterday AT&T reported they activated 3.2 million iPhones in Q3 of 2009, and of those activations, 40% went to new subscribers. So even though we do hear a lot of problems with AT&T coverage-wise (excluding my experience which has been fine), that figure is a bit surprising. The iPhone must just be amazing enough to trump the problems, or rather perceived problems with AT&T. Well I think so but I've been accused of being a fan boy so make your own decision.

In other news they also posted almost a 34% increase in sales of services such as Internet access, messaging, etc, making data sales approximately 30% of the wireless revenue for AT&T. However profit was down $3.2 billion USD from $3.23 billion USD same time last year. Boggles the mind how these numbers are thrown around doesn't it?