Verizon iPhone Clears 1 Million-Sold Mark
NEW YORK, (TheStreet) — Verizon's(VZ) Apple(AAPL) iPhone sales, while deceptively slow, still managed to fly past the 1 million-sold milepost. — Dan Mead, Verizon Wireless chief, told media outlets this weekend that 60% of the company's iPhone sales were preorders.
Context & Ripple Effects
The milestone lands roughly where the run-up said it would: after predictions that the Verizon iPhone would top one million in its first week, Apple had readied two million iPhone 4 units for preorders and retail, and Verizon's two-hour preorder window in early February already set the carrier's first-day sales record. Chief Dan Mead now confirms the million-sold mark, with 60% of those sales coming from preorders — demand concentrated before store shelves ever filled.
What makes the number matter is who lost the monopoly behind it: since AT&T activated its own first million iPhones back in 2007, the device has been exclusive to one U.S. carrier, and the January 2011 Verizon–Apple deal ended that. The same announcement put a Verizon-networked iPad in play alongside the phone.
First-order effects
- Verizon converts pent-up CDMA demand into subscribers immediately — 600,000-plus preorder customers are already committed, and the phone gives the carrier its strongest retention tool against AT&T since the iPhone launched.
- Apple gains a second U.S. distribution channel mid-cycle, letting it sell into a customer base that waited four years rather than switching carriers.
Second-order effects
- AT&T, no longer the sole U.S. iPhone outlet, is pushed to compete on price, upgrade timing, and its own network pitch to hold the base it monopolized since 2007.
- Verizon's own hardware roadmap gets more complicated: the carrier has a Motorola smartphone slated for its new 4G network, which switched on across 38 cities in December, so the iPhone now competes for marketing priority inside Verizon's lineup.
Third-order effects
- If multi-carrier iPhone launches become the pattern, U.S. carrier exclusivity windows shrink from years toward months, shifting leverage from carriers' networks to whoever controls the device brand and its upgrade cadence.
- Million-unit launch benchmarks become the standard scoreboard for carrier-device debuts, pressuring both Apple and its partners to stage inventory — as the two-million-unit stock-up shows — around predictable demand spikes.
The trend: The iPhone's move off a single U.S. carrier marks the shift from exclusive handset deals toward multi-carrier distribution, where launch-scale logistics and preorder demand, not network lock-in, decide winners.