Verizon iPhone Already Representing 3% of U.S. iPhone Traffic as AT&T Hands Out 1000 Free Minutes
While lines for the public launch of the Verizon iPhone were generally short yesterday, the device had already been making its way into customers' hands through a pre-order program for existing Verizon customers, and many have been wondering just how strong sales of the new device have been.
Mobile ad firm Chitika today
announced that it has put together a
live tracker showing the relative balance of AT&T and Verizon iPhones showing up on the company's advertising network. The data, which is based on a rolling 24-hour average and is updated hourly, currently shows the Verizon iPhone already grabbing 3% of the U.S. base as measured by the limited study.
We spoke with Chitika's Dan Ruby and asked him if he could come up with a ballpark figure of the number of Verizon iPhones that might already be in circulation. Such an estimate would of course be based on a number of guesses and assumptions, including the percentage of iPhone sales occurring in the U.S., the percentages of phones of given ages still in operation, and even just how representative Chitika's data is of iPhone usage as a whole. But given those constraints and understanding the likelihood of a significant margin of error, Ruby offered an estimate in the range of 900,000 Verizon iPhones currently in use.
While Verizon is continuing to grow its base of iPhone users from scratch, AT&T has continued its push to retain its iPhone customers with a new initiative of its own.
According to 9 to 5 Mac and
AppAdvice, AT&T has started sending text messages to some iPhone users offering them 1000 free rollover minutes in appreciation for their business. Customers can accept the offer by responding "YES" to the 11113020 number from which the text message comes. A number of users have reported success simply sending "YES" to that number without having received the text message, although the confirmation text notes that it can take up to four weeks for the bonus minutes to be credited to customers' accounts.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...