iPhone News Updated

The iPhone is more than half of Apple’s revenue

One way to measure the importance of the iPhone is to note that it now accounts for more than half the sales of its increasingly upwardly mobile manufacturer, despite surges in iPad and Mac sales.

It could probably be said that the Apple iPod is the electronic device that convinced a generation or two of people that Apple products were worth carrying with them everywhere. That, of course, was primarily a music thing. Then Apple came out with the iPhone, and a bit later the iPad Touch. Now that generation not only had something to carry with them everywhere, but that something was multitalented. The iPhone was a little computer that people could put in their pocket and run useful little applications on, as well as listen to their music, and by the way, it was also a telephone.

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Verizon iPhone 4 close enough to taste, will Apple meet pent-up demand

The Verizon iPhone 4 is close enough to taste it: testing is so close to completion that a prototype has been spotted in the wild already, current exclusive iPhone partner AT&T is already publicly treating that exclusivity like it’s a thing of the past, and Verizon is even staffing up in preparation for the larger company that it’s about to become – and yet the start of the 2010 holiday season is still a month away.

It all poses the quandary of why Apple and Verizon are choosing to sit on the Verizon iPhone 4 until after 2010 is over, rather than launching it now and reaping the benefits of being able to sell the iPhone to Verizon customers during the upcoming holiday rush.

Several explanations come to mind. The first is that the Verizon iPhone 4 is simply not ready yet. Despite appearing to be nearly done with testing, that doesn’t mean the testing went well. The second is that Apple is in no hurry, seeing how well iPhone 4 sales are going thus far without the benefit of Verizon. The third is that AT&T, still hanging onto whatever shards of iPhone exclusivity remain, is disallowing a Verizon iPhone 4 from happening until 2011. And then there’s Verizon’s mixed feelings about the iPhone, as the carrier knows that a Verizon iPhone will deliver an ugly blow to sales of its own pet Droid project, which had until been seeing significant growth.

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