Verizon still mum on iPhone sales
“Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.” — Verizon iPhone launch day. Photo: Chris B. — That's what Steve Jobs had to say in 2009 about sales figures for the Kindle — which, it bears repeating, Amazon (AMZN) has still never revealed.
Context & Ripple Effects
The silence caps a two-year arc: Verizon's chief executive told Apple of his interest in carrying the iPhone back in April 2010, the phone finally launched on the network in early 2011, and analysts predicted first-week sales above one million units — buoyed by the observation that only 26% of Verizon's subscriber base had smartphones, a huge untapped upgrade pool.
Now Fortune notes Verizon has said nothing about actual sell-through, invoking Steve Jobs' own 2009 jab that companies usually brag when something sells well — aimed then at Amazon, which by this point still has never disclosed a single Kindle unit figure. The symmetry gives the non-disclosure story more bite than routine corporate reticence.
First-order effects
- Investors and analysts tracking the Verizon iPhone launch have no confirmed unit figure from either carrier or Apple, leaving third-party estimates — including the widely cited 1-million-in-a-week projection — as the de facto public record.
Second-order effects
- With Verizon withholding numbers, attention concentrates on Apple's own quarterly reporting cadence, making Apple's next earnings call the pressure valve where the market will try to pin down CDMA iPhone volumes; AT&T, meanwhile, gets a reprieve from direct head-to-head comparisons during the launch window.
Third-order effects
- If the Amazon Kindle precedent holds — years of withheld figures with no apparent penalty — carriers and device makers gain cover to treat unit sales as optional disclosure, shifting the industry's demand-signalling job permanently onto financial reports and supply-chain inference rather than vendor announcements.
The trend: Consumer-tech companies are increasingly comfortable withholding unit-sales figures, leaving analysts to reconstruct demand from earnings disclosures and supply-chain signals instead of official counts.