Apple: 250,000 unlocked iPhones in the wild

Just how many iPhone have been unlocked by pesky AT&T haters? Apple’s guessing a quarter of a million, which comes out to one out of every six of the 1.4 million that have been sold. If you ask me, that sounds low. I know not one, not two, but four unlockers, and they’re the majority of the iPhone owners I know. Granted, the group I run with tends to be a little geekier than the average iPhone owner, but it’s significant.

That being said, Apple still has an uphill battle to gain a reasonable market share, locked or unlocked. If Apple sold seven times in a year what it’s sold in the last three months, it would have one percent of the American market. Apple must be realizing that the cellphone market now is far different than the MP3 player market was six years ago, when the iPod launched.

Unlocked iPhones may total 250,000 [It’s in the PI]