Only Two-Thirds of iPhones Are Activated Legally

With all this talk of jailbreaks and unlocking, you’ve got to wonder how many people are actually using a locked iPhone with AT&T. Turns out that it’s not nearly as many as you think.

Don’t worry, there isn’t too much math involved, but you might want to whip out a calculator to double check these figures. First, Apple said that a total of 3.7 million iPhones were sold over the course of 2007. AT&T also told us that they have about two million iPhones subscribed to their service. Add in the European subscribers (O2, Orange, and T-Mobile) and you’ve got a total of about 2.4 million folks who subscribe their iPhones to the appropriate service provider.

When you divide 2.4 million by 3.7 million, you get just shy of two-thirds, meaning that over one-third of iPhones out there are not “legally” activated, instead being unlocked and used on other networks (like T-Mobile USA). These are rough figures, of course. Looks like Steve Jobs is missing out on some of his, ahem, supplementary income.