Really? You mean millions more in unit sales from Verizon, Sprint, and international CDMA carriers isn't a compelling reason?
You mean zero additional US sales, with the only other international CDMA markets being where the iPhone would be priced out of reach for the bulk of that market, as you categorically and humorously claim for GSM (the number of "developed nation" customers on GSM where the iPhone is not available locally exceeds the
total number of CDMA users worldwide, for crying out loud). There can be no Verizon or Sprint iPhone until
at least next year.
and many claimed they were simply waiting for it to be available on their network provider.
Key word being "claimed". The thing about consumer surveys is that you get unreliable results when the situation is entirely hypothetical.
Use the CDMA iPhone resources for "Improving availability"?? How exactly would that work? The only other major GSM carrier is Tmobile
I'm referring, obviously, to expansion into international markets. How would it work? The way it currently works. You spend money in carrier deals, foreign regulatory compliance, backend development, and iTunes Store arrangements--i.e.
improve availability of the product.
Seeing as though there is no option to approach Verizon or any other US carrier and that the LTE version may well be offered on Verizon, engineering a dead-end CDMA product remains, as always, uncompelling. T-Mobile is irrelevant.
Phone sales on AT&T are going to stall at some point, and the only way to find major growth in the United States will be availability on Verizon and Sprint, who combined have most of the other cellphone subscribers in the USA.
Yeah, and when that happens, CDMA will have several more nails in its coffin, making it even
less worthwhile an effort and
less attractive a technology.
Why is Verizon not a "prime candidate" right now?
It's barred by contract and it's CDMA. It's not exactly a hugely nuanced situation.
LTE is not going to be in widespread use for at least 18+ months at a minimum
Correct. Right about the time the AT&T exclusivity ends.
the phones will almost certainly use a CDMA radio as fallback.
In the case of the iPhone, highly doubtful.
Based on the 100 million CDMA users in the United States alone (which is easily the largest market for the iPhone based on its popularity), it should be well worth the investment -- not even counting
the hundreds of millions more CDMA users internationally.
Again, 400 million versus 4
billion. All for a technology that will be phased out within the next five years. It would be a dead-end model and that's exactly why it hasn't happened and won't.
Nearly every other International phone manufacturer makes models for both CDMA and GSM networks
Because they're in the business of doing so. If they didn't have to, they wouldn't, and if they were starting up this year, they wouldn't, either. It's not worth the investment when GSM sales remain strong and untapped and with next-generation networks already in the pre-deployment phase. It'd be like a startup company introducing an analog cell phone in 1999.
You are missing the point. Although GSM is far more popular, billions of those users are in the developing world where the iPhone is far from affordable
You're just misconstruing the point; it's not being missed. Verizon is a single provider operating a dead-end technology. Going through the necessary work, which you still dismiss implicitly through horrendously unparallel arguments about irrelevant factors, for a single model, for a single carrier, for a period of time barely longer than a single year, just flat out isn't happening.
The only way to grow is to tap into the millions of USA/Canadian CDMA subscribers that are just waiting for an iPhone to be available on their network.
You keep using this argument, but it makes no sense. There's nowhere to go beyond that market. It is, for the
nth time, a dead end. Once they get the few million Verizon diehards who would, in fact, buy one, that's it. There is zero potential for further growth. If you want to talk about market saturation, that's a one-step game. The GSM market is nowhere
near saturated, in stark contrast. To grow, Apple simply needs to expand the availability of its current products, aggressively price future products, and ride the wave of "new money" markets.
You can't argue that Verizon on CDMA is a strategy for long-term growth. Verizon's a good investment, but on LTE, not on CDMA.
Particularly when they are no doubt going to end up making an LTE iPhone that falls back on CDMA in the future anyways?
The LTE iPhone will, in all likelihood,
not fall back to CDMA networks. Verizon customers will either have to deal with spotty LTE service areas or hope Verizon puts together a good roaming agreement for its LTE products.
bring it on verizon... i cant wait
