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Those who suspected Verizon customers were waiting for the iPhone 4S before pulling the iOS trigger may have been correct: the carrier has announced it sold 4.2 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2011. The number more than doubles the units sold in the third quarter of the year, when the iPhone 4 was the only model Verizon had to offer. Even more impressive, it bests the 4.1 million iPhone activations AT&T boasted about for the holiday quarter of 2010 — even though Verizon has only carried Apple's device for less than a year.
It's not all upside, however. Despite the increased sales, Verizon actually saw its profit margins shrink due to the higher carrier subsidies Apple negotiates. Still, we can't imagine the carrier is complaining about the new customers that are signing up for two-year contracts. We won't have a sense of AT&T's holiday sales numbers until its earnings call on January 26th, but with Big Red's LTE rollout continuing at a breakneck pace, and an LTE iPhone rumored for next year, we wouldn't be surprised to see Ma Bell's iPhone sales overtaken sooner rather than later.
Comments
Please, no Ma Bell or El Goog.
sciwiz - January 5, 2012
i’ve been with att(cingular) for almost 10 years now, and i must say i’ve hated just about every minute of it. reception has improved a lot, but i still hate them. but the sad thing is, they have hands down the best portfolio of devices out of all 4 carriers. they have multiple (hero/budget) handsets from every major platform and dont waste their money marketing/putting out new android phones every 4-6 months like verizon does
and on a 2nd and i guess somewhat related note, it always boggle my mind how people stick up for verizon, when their policies are just as bad (and in many ways worse) as ma bell
simbadogg - January 5, 2012
Judging by your comment it sounds like you don’t hate them as much as you thought you did.
jbrandonf - January 5, 2012 via mobile
No, they have terrible service. But they have a better portfolio of phones. Would you pass on a focus s or titan for a Lumia 710, trophy or radar?
i don’t see it any differently than the many iPhone users that stuck with at&t when it was the only carrier with an iPhone.
simbadogg - January 5, 2012
It took AT&T FOREVER to even bother with Android. Also, putting out new phones constantly is a GOOD thing. It gives people choice, so they aren’t buying the phone that was the hot thing 6 months ago, they’re buying the one that everyone is talking about now. Every carrier except T-MO has the iphone now, and they all also have a million flavors of Android. AT&T is nothing special in this arena.
keverson42 - January 5, 2012
This “choice is good” is such a tired argument already. So you would rather have choice and sacrifice service, support and quick upgrades I’m assuming? Ziegler pointed this out in his article “a good smartphone comes but once a year”, carriers and OEMs only have limited resources, so when you have phones like the sensation coming out, then the amaze 4g 120 days later…thr end users quality of service will suffer. Also, if a phone is a good phone shouldn’t it be expected to have legs for a year? Android is the only ecosystem where a phones successor gets released after 3 months, and if you think this is because they want to give consumers a cornucopia of choices you’re dead wrong. Carriers like to release a constant stream of new phones even when they’re no better than the predecessor for people that don’t keep track phones. In the long run, if all carriers continue to do that it’s just going to make the back end support for all these phones a complete mess.
simbadogg - January 5, 2012
You lost me when you implied that choice is not good.
keverson42 - January 6, 2012
Verizon had the Nexus, Rezound, and RAZR for the holiday season (and the Bionic before that).
What has AT&T put out this holiday that even comes close to that?
CtrlAltDel121 - January 5, 2012
Coming from a similar background as a Baby Bell, they should be as bad or worse than Verizon. The only difference for me was moving from a BellSouth area to an SBC area where they couldn’t give me a new phone number without replacing the SIM. Even then, it took a 50 mile drive and 5 people to change the SIM card and update things to change the phone number.
bousozoku - January 5, 2012
I severely dislike Verizon… That being said I’ve been with them for about 10 years also, but that doesn’t change the fact that they continually piss me off…
curtisas - January 5, 2012
I know this is off Topic but I just feel the need to say this….
@VERGE…Just keep doing what you are doing, this has been easily the best website transition ever from Engadget. This Website is Fast, thorough and so informative on every article. Can’t believe you guys have become this great so fast.
EngadgetRefugee - January 5, 2012
Second that.
uncaughtexception - January 5, 2012
^5
MUSCLENERD - January 5, 2012
Well, the were what made Engadget good to begin with.
Now that the reins are off they shine (while Engadget goes down the drain).
Tikigawd - January 5, 2012
the profit margins shrink in the short term only.. all the 2 year contracts that iPhone users have to sign up for are generally more expensive than the average verizon contract and thus verizon will make up for the higher subsidy in the long run!
SunnyDee - January 5, 2012
a 2 year contract makes them the same money whether they are WP7, Android or iOS users. The iPhone users though cost them more to acquire.
patfactorx - January 5, 2012
Exactly. Coupled that with iPhone users, though being heavy web surfers, are not data hogs. So, none of these guys are exceeding their data limits potentially like Android users. Even though iPhone sales broke their records, it ends up being a loss compared to other handsets, which are cheaper to the carrier, but carry the same contract as iPhones. Now, if they sold substantially MORE iPhones than all other smartphone handsets combined, then you can make an argument. But I’m more likely to believe that the macro-break out of market share is represented on the micro-level within VZW’s network. In other words, iPhone probably only makes up somewhere around 30% of VZW’s smartphone contracts and the majority are the others. So, it’s a loss either way.
sooper_verge12 - January 5, 2012
The upside to this: They out sold at&t and that’s all that matters.
sooper_verge12 - January 5, 2012
Doubt they woulda sold 4.1 million non-iPhones in the same quarter if iPhones weren’t offered at Verizon.
slackguy - January 5, 2012
that all comes down to marketing, so its hard to say
Vellion - January 5, 2012
I remember AT&T complaining in 2007-2008 about the iPhone users being data hogs. Of course, they didn’t have the Android users at the time. Now, I’m sure they’re to the point that all smart phone users are costly.
bousozoku - January 5, 2012
“and an LTE iPhone rumored for next year”
I think this year is “next year” xD
Ah-Chai - January 5, 2012
When Qualcomm gets off its ass and released the chipsets that can handle LTE & 3G without having to have a separate radio for each – that will be the day I consider another LTE device.
Verizon’s gimmicky marketing caught me for the HTC Thunderbolt – but that was a terrible phone (bad battery life, bad phone performance, thick and heavy – to say the least).
When they figure out how to give the iPhone LTE, without making the battery life drop, or making the phone heavier/thicker – Thats when ill use my last Verizon upgrade credit and pull the trigger on another phone (also have unlimited Data on that line – yipppyyyy).
Till then – Having the S. Focus on one ATT line and the 4s on another, is working just fine for me.
TheFleetingFox - January 5, 2012
I am glad for Verizon but seriously walking around with some silly iphone when you can have the rose royce of android like the Galaxy Nexus is amazing to me.
Richard Yarrell - January 5, 2012 via mobile
*Rolls Royce.
Different strokes, different folks Richard. Now while everyone over at Androidandme may be used to your pro Android and pro Sprint stance, here its usually nicer to kep your opinion to yourself on articles and let them be known on the forums, k?
youtube10 - January 5, 2012 via mobile
Maybe he meant Rose Royce and likes to use his Nexus to play Car Wash?
Cloudgazer - January 5, 2012
What’s silly about it?
drwitwicki - January 5, 2012
Do I amaze you?
RoboticSpacePenguin - January 5, 2012 via mobile
Bigger screen yes. LTE yes. But other than that the iPhone 4S is better than the Nexus in my view for everything else:
1. Camera
2. Music player
3. App store and inbuilt apps
4. Media store
5. Screen
6. Build quality and design
But to each his own. For a lot of people the Nexus is just too big. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
Avpallino - January 5, 2012 via mobile
Not to mention far more powerful GPU on the 4S, if you enjoy 3D graphics on your handheld (not everyone cares about this of course).
darkcrayon - January 5, 2012
I would really like to know, practically speaking, if there is a single game or app available for iOS that can fully take advantage of that gpu or couldn’t run just as well on a a phone like the Nexus. We see all the time in PC and console gaming where certain “graphical enhancements” are made for games for a specific manufacturer’s hardware but that doesn’t mean that another vendor’s hardware is actually incapable of running that same game’s enhancements just as well. Nvidia and ATI have been doing this for years. Itwouldn’t shock me at all if the best graphical iOS exclusive apps and games that are currently out are fully capable of running in their full glory (and at good framr rates) on the Nexus or a few other higher end Android devices…
earthzero - January 5, 2012 via mobile
InfinityBlade-2 gets lots of graphical bells and whistles on the 4S that it doesn’t get on the iPhone-4 – in fact even InfinityBlade-1 did. Given that the iPhone-4 has the same GPU as the Nexus that would seem to count.
Apple isn’t paying Chair to make InfinityBlade-1 better on the iPad-2 than it was on the iPhone4/iPad-1.
Does it ‘fully take advantage of that GPU’? That’s impossible to say, but it does take advantage.
Cloudgazer - January 5, 2012
Too bad for GNexus owners, though, right? 12 months down the track, 4S owners will be loving the graphically-capable games they get, whilst the GNexus owners are stuck with MC3-quality games (graphically speaking). Yes, a dual-core GPU IS an advantage.
slackguy - January 5, 2012
any game that uses the new unreal engine.
arkham city, infinity blade two.
the way android multi tasking works will never let the app get as much priority as a wp7 or iOS device does.
JesseDegenerate - January 5, 2012
Rose Royce? Are we at the car wash?
I ditched my Android-based phone for an iPhone 4S and I won’t switch back until Android matures, no matter how many years it takes.
bousozoku - January 5, 2012
AT&T is expected to report somewhere around 6M iPhone sold.
I now am interested in Verizon’s total numbers for holiday season smartphone activation. Last quarter iPhone is 32% of all smartphones Verizon had sold, At AT&T the percentage was 56%. This quarter iPhone could reach for 66% at AT&T. How it fared in Android’s backyard?
ArseneKarl - January 5, 2012
This is shaping up to be a fantastic quarter for Apple in the US – with the addition of both Verizon and Sprint they’re going to be way over 100% YoY. The market is going to be very interesting in 2012.
Cloudgazer - January 5, 2012
Yes we are all literally jazzed up about Apple’s financial bottom line. I am pretty sure we might convince TheVerge staff to hold a live blog of some sorts when the numbers are due.
id4andrei - January 5, 2012
You mistake my point. I’m not concerned with the bottom line, so much as how the US market is developing. The drop in smartphone adoption rates that we saw in the last ComScore numbers indicates that future growth for Android & Apple may have to come from other platforms to a much greater extent.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t give out much more geographical data than Google does, so their numbers won’t really inform much on this. It’s the December and January ComScore numbers, along with the carrier specific numbers that I’m jazzed about :)
Cloudgazer - January 5, 2012
More on topic, this is good news for app sales on all platforms because it helps to uphold the growing movement of customers from dumb phones to smart phones. It’s all good in my opinion as far as that goes…
earthzero - January 5, 2012 via mobile
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