Apple estimates 250,000 unlocked iPhones

"Apple estimates that 250,000 iPhones were sold with the intention of unlocking"

During their sales call, Apple stated that they estimate (and they have sales numbers minus AT&T numbers so they know that they are talking about) that 250,000 of the 1.4 million iPhone sold were unlocked.

That is over 17%!!!

Way more than almost anyone has anticipated. 

Also,  Apple is "estimating" when they have sales numbers and AT&T figures at their disposal.  It is in Apple’s financial interest to artificially deflate this number so they probably rounded down.

Just to clarify: this is sim unlocks which is much less than the number of people on AT&T who unlock their phone for just the applications.  That is probably closer to 50%.

To Quote Timothy D. Cook:

Toni, we were very happy with the elasticity that we saw. It enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around a million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people that have an intention to unlock and where we don’t know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is there is probably 250,000 of the 1.4 million that we sold where people had bought them with the intention of doing that. Many of those happened after the price cut. (full transcript here)