How much is your iPhone contract worth to Apple?
How much is your iPhone contract worth to Apple? Today, we got a concrete answer. It's worth €600. According to MacRumors, Deutsche Telekom will start selling an unlocked iPhone for €999 as well as the locked €399 version that comes with a two year contract. For those who don't want to jump over to google, that €600 is equivalent to $879.48 at today's exchange rate. That's very, very close to the New York Time's estimate of $831 late last month.
I worked up a little math based on these costs and our recent options coverage. At the going American rates, you pay $399 for the iPhone. Add to that either $1440, $1920, or $2400 for the individual 2-year costs and clearly Apple is getting a huge chunk of that money. If you go the contract-free way that I did, those costs drop to $1200 for the least expensive plan, assuming a 2-year period of use. If you then, as I did, go ahead and drop your data plan, that number drops even lower, to $719.76. In other words, I just became a loss to AT&T if they have to fork over the full normal value to Apple for two years. What do you think? Is AT&T sending a fixed amount or a percentage of the monthly fees?
