Nonsense on just about every count, I'm afraid. The US is just one market, and Apple's already getting a reasonable share of it - anyone who really wants an iPhone that much in the US is moving to AT&T.
Labeling arguments as nonsense don't make them so. My arguments are actually very solid from a business point of view.
1) The USA is indeed just one market. One market of relatively
high-income subscribers who have a very favorable opinion of the iPhone. One markets that has seen half of all unit sales of the iPhone, with over 200+ million cellphone customers, and 135 million of them just on the major CDMA networks - Verizon and Sprint - where the iPhone is unavailable.
The rest of the world's a massively bigger market and in many respects more sophisticated in terms of maturity and some of the things that people do with their phones (e-payment in Japan being a good example). Apple would be out of their mind to spend time and money catering for a provincial requirement like US CDMA when there's a whole big GSM world to go after.
Sure, the rest of the world is a larger market. Howver, You are missing some key facts
1) Despite your claim of other countries being more advanced and trying to minimize the importance of the USA,
*HALF OF ALL UNIT SALES have occured in the United states* so clearly it has been far more popular here - thus America is far more important as a lucrative market than just its total cellphone subscribers would suggest.
2) Of the four billion cellphone users in the world, how many are in the position to buy an expensive smartphone and smartphone data plan. How many of those have expressed interest in the device.
3) *Most importantly*, you are acting as if I am suggesting they replace their HSPA iPhone with a CDMA iPhone. Clearly they can do both, and the added costs in production and engineering resources is easily recouped with the millions of sales they would see of a CDMA iPhone model -- and just in the USA and Canada. Other CDMA markets would be gravy on top.
The idea is that Apple profits handsomely off of the AT&T exclusivity agreement for people who buy the iPhone, and Apple ALSO makes a reasonable profit for the people who pass on the iPhone and get an iPod Touch instead.
There is no way in hell that Apple's inflated subsidy that AT&T is paying would come anywhere near offsetting the potential revenue of a CDMA iPhone. We are talking about 135 million users on just Verizon and Sprint, and based on surveys a (relatively) enormous amount of subscribers said they were interested in the iPhone if it came to their network. (I believe it was something like 20%).
Even assuming a *very* conservative 8-10 million CDMA sales over the next year, and the normal $200 subsidy that Verizon and Sprint usually apply to expensive smartphones, you are talking a revenue number in the billions. This would easily offset the engineering involved and increased fixed costs of having two models -- not to mention that Verizon's LTE network will rely on CDMA as a fallback. Perhaps more importantly, they don't even expect their first LTE phones until the second-half of 2011 at the earliest. So Apple is going to have to get into supporting CDMA engineering/testing anyways.
260,000,000 million cell phone users in the US so ~100 million is a nice market. However, globally there are 4,100,000,000 cell phone users. ~400 million isn't that much compared to 4 billion and considering Apple wanted to distribute the iPhone globally, it makes sense for them to choose what most people have.
Actually just Verizon and Sprint combined is over 135 million. The rest are either on Tmobile (no nationwide 3G network yet), small regional carriers, or prepaid. The iPhone interest on AT&T is going to saturate eventually and most of the individuals on another carrier that were interested in switching to get the iPhone have already done so considering it's been nearly two years since the iPhone release which means everyones contracts on other carriers should have expired by now. Obviously AT&T will continue to siphon a stream of users from other carriers, but there are surely millions of interested potential iPhone customers who will not switch to AT&T.
Look at AT&T's coverage (or lackthereof) in the west, their spotty 3G coverage, even whole states are left out! Also, Verizon has a HUGE amount of small business and corporate accounts that people are stuck on.
Secondly, I never said they should REPLACE the HSPA iPhone with a CDMA model. They can easily create both models and cell the CDMA one in North/South America where most of the CDMA networks are. The revenue would easily offset the relatively minor engineering costs.
This reminds me of the US senator who tried to insist that a CDMA network got built in Iraq after the invasion, despite the fact that it's completely surrounded by countries running GSM - the point, unsurprisingly, being that he had CDMA hardware vendors in his state. Fortunately someone actually saw sense and Iraq joined the rest of the world.
Hmm, I don't see the connection. The situation in Iraq was ridiculous -- the iPhone one is a solid business case.
