Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

A CNN report from Mashable cites a TechCrunch article by Steve Cheney (maybe we ARE living in a big echo chamber after all ) that millions of CDMA chipsets have been ordered from Qualcomm by Apple, for iPhone manufacture in December. The delivery date perhaps suggests an iPhone on Verizon in the U.S. in January 2011.

The CNN report mentions an earlier article on Mashable that “talks” about an SEC filing by AT&T (Form 10-Q [you’re welcome!]) in which AT&T states that it does not expect to lose many iPhone customers when its iPhone exclusivity ends – “… we do not expect any such terminations to have a material negative impact on our Wireless segment income, consolidated operating margin or our cash from operations.”

Right.

I don’t think anyone is saying that EVERBODY is going to change to Verizon all at once – it just seems that there will be initial pent-up demand for a Verizon iPhone and that a number of other iPhone users will switch when it makes sense to them.

The Mashable article quotes parts of one MASSIVE paragraph (probably longer than some of MINE!) with arguments about the high barriers (scientists might call them “activation energies“) to switching carriers. (Yes, marketing types steal a lot of concepts from real science.) Ultimately, Mashable calls the AT&T statements “wishful thinking.” (The rest of the article is kind of fun to read, too! )

The TechCrunch article estimates that “A CDMA-based iPhone would likely sell 2-3 million units in the first few weeks (modeled after the iPhone 4’s oversubscribed launch).” The article goes on to say:

“Sources with knowledge of this entire situation have assured me that Apple has submitted orders for millions of units of Qualcomm CDMA chipsets for a Verizon iPhone run due in December. This production run would likely be for a January launch, and I’d bet the phone is nearly 100% consistent with the current iPhone 4 (with a fixed internal insulator on the antenna).”

We shall see.

Yes, tech is a lot of fun to watch, especially when your personal livelihood is no longer “riding” on it.

-Bill at

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