14 DAY TRIAL // During the Goldman Sachs Technology Symposium, Apple COO Tim Cook assured investors as well as the press that Apple was right on track with its iPhone, for the 10 million sold units landmark. Although Cook also talked economic decline and iPod sales, the iPhone emphasis was obvious, especially when Apple's COO mentioned the upcoming SDK.
"First of all, I think it's really important to realize that very few companies in the world know how to build a platform," Cook said. "You can count them on a few fingers. Apple is one of them. We've had the Mac platform for years and really understand this. [...] And as we got into the phone more and more, it became clear to us that we should release an SDK and we're going to talk more about that next week at our event. But in essence what it does is it will make the product even more compelling. This is a product that has the highest customer satisfaction (rate) of any Apple product ever shipped, which is a very, very high bar. We're super excited about where this can take us."
Bottom line is, Cook is confident that not only is Apple's iPhone right on track for the 10 million landmark, but will undoubtedly reach it with ease by the end of 2008, thanks (in part) to the upcoming SDK, which developers are said to be able to do wonders with.
Cook also shed some light on Apple's position towards unlocked phones. Not surprisingly (and in typical Apple manner), Cook confidently stated: "We're not married to any business model," revealing his "short version" for the real iPhone controversy as follows: "We have a situation where we've purposefully rolled out iPhone in four markets (the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France). We did this at this chosen speed so we would learn, and could apply those learnings to future rollouts, etc. And we are right on track where we want to be. The four million units that we've sold over the first 200 days gives us confidence that we can achieve 10 million units in 2008."