that's just gross...I want to have $646 million in stock!

so just subtract 20,000 from the first day sales total for a real number.

Haha...so he gives all his employees an iPhone so now they will have to get a 2 year contract from AT&T just to use the damn phone, most likely all of them already own a cell phone and have contracts with Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile..etc...watch all these employees E-bay their free iPhone

Don't worry, most of those will probably end up on Ebay.

Uh...I wouldn't mind if my company would give me an IPhone. Seems like a nice perk and better than the crappy drink cooler I got last year from my company. lol

.... You do not have to sign a 2 year contract to use the phone. You can do month to month with no contract, signing a contractis only required up front in cases where you are getting a discount on the phone itself. Where these people have the phone they can simply walk into any cingular store and pay $25 for a SIM card and start an account on a month to month basis.

2ndly if they have T-mobile or similar, they can spend the $10-20 and have it unlocked and use it with their current subscriber

Common sense > *

At least there are 20,000 iPhone users on the first day of release. Amazing!

Jobs, please put him out of him misery and give him one! :)

I'm pretty sure that Apple has done something to the phones to lock them from doing this. I read it in an article on this site actually. I could be wrong, but I do remember something about that.

No they cannot. The iPhone does not take SIM cards and will not work on any network other than AT&T.

It is possible that they can go month-to-month with AT&T, but they cannot "simply walk into a Cingular store"

Reading comprehension > *

Common sense is right Chris. Unfortunately Apple forgot about common sense when they made the sim card unaccessable in the iPhone, also there is no apple designed way to unlock the phone either (have to wait for hackers).

You need a contract to use it, you cannot use a different SIM card, and you cannot unlock it. Apple has already said all of that.

Have the $600 thats a car payment or house note for some. Or a computer monitor upgrade,Blu ray Player, PS3....lol

So if the phone really only costs $125 to make how or why is the gift calculated at $599...oh let me think a bigger tax write off?

It sure isnt costing Apple or Jobs 12 million

It says right on apples website that you must sign a two year contract to take use of its features, such as the ipod. If you're off the grid, no music or videos for you. lame.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html

read the phine print.

Considering Apple is in silly valley, $600 is about 1/6th-1/8th of their average house note...

A two year contract at $60/month, a $40 activation fee plus the cost of the device is a minimum of $1980. And you can't even use the iPod feature without this 2-year agreement. So you're effectively renting your iPod. And what happens if you decide not to renew after 2 years. Does the iPhone music feature stop working? I'll take a good old ordinary iPod any day.

Cingular IS AT&T now.

It's valued at retail price because of opportunity cost, which amounts to the cost sales lost.

its sure a good way to boost their market share.

Um... Not certain about the other stuff (except that Cingular is AT&T as DJ pointed out) but the iPhone apparently does use SIMs. Refer to the caption below the first photo on the third page of anandtech's disection:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3026&p=3

wish i was a billionaire, i'd give away .0000001% of my fortune any day, and then people would love be for being rich, and worship me like a god.

silly poor people, i mother##@$##@ own you :)

ATT is likely giving Apple $200 plus for every person that signs up for service. If Apple can make the phone for less then they make a profit on every phone they give away. I used to sell phones at Radio Shack and I know that Radio Shack gets ~$200 per 2 year commitment so this might just a break even for Apple.

On a separate note, I wish that Microsoft would learn a thing or two from the marketing that apple puts out there. I hate those apple vs pc commercials but I have no doubt that people are buying macs because of it. Microsoft saved apple from going out of business and this is how apple re-pays them? By stabbing them in the back with these misleading commercials?