During its quarterly earnings conference call Monday, Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook estimated that 250,000 iPhones were sold to people with the intention of unlocking them, adding that most of those sales happened after the $200 price drop.
While it"s not entirely clear how Cook calculated such a number, it likely relates to the discrepancy between sold phones and those that were actually activated on AT&T"s network. 1.4 million iPhones have been sold in total, meaning that a whopping 17% were intended to be unlocked by customers. Hackers have managed to bypass the device"s restrictions, but Apple warns that future updates could make an unlocked iPhone inoperable, just as firmware version 1.1.1 did temporarily.