How Quickly Apple and AT&T Are Making $2 Billion off the iPhone

I found this interesting piece on GigaOm and thought I’d share it with you. It doesn’t say how much money Apple is making off the iPhone though a quick math can give us a vague idea.

If it costs $180 to build an iPhone and Apple sells each unit to AT&T (or other carriers) at $550, then it makes a profit of $370 per unit sold.

$370 times 5.2 million iPhones sold in the third quarter of 2009 makes Apple a profit of $1,924,000,000 (for quarter 3 only). That’s almost 2 billion dollars in profits!!! To this, you have to subtract costs such as marketing, salaries, etc… but still, that’s a hell lot of money.

These are obviously rough numbers but they shouldn’t

Any iPhone Can Be Infected By Spywares

So you thought you’re iPhone was safe from getting any worm or virus because you didn’t jailbreak it? Think again! We talked before about Ikee, iPhone/Privacy.A and other unnamed worms but only those jailbroken iPhones were vulnerable. Now your brand new stock iPhone may get infected too…

According to the Register:

Swiss iPhone developer Nicolas Seriot has published research on security shortcomings that could create a mechanism for hackers to lift data from regulation iPhones. Email accounts, keyboard entries held in cache and browser history files are all potentially exposed by a malicious app.

Seriot has developed a proof of concept app, called SpyPhone, in order to demonstrate how Apple’s own APIs might be misused to read

Is AT&T to Blame for Poor iPhone Experience and Is Non-Exclusivity the Answer?

Is AT&T to blame for the poor iPhone experience in cities like San Francisco and New York, where calls drop, data fails, and bars depict signal strength with no real connection behind them? And if so, what can they do about it — build more network infrastructure, create tiered pricing, or maybe just give up on exclusivity?

Dan Lyons, writing under his nom-de-guerre Fake Steve Jobs recently posted a curse-filled parody, describing an entirely fictional, frighteningly plausible conversation between his character and an equally fake AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson. It’s climax:

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that

Apps for Less: TomTom Navigation USA, Super Monkey Ball 2, Wolfram Alpha

Today we have some pretty decent sales going on in the App Store in time for some last minute holiday shopping!

First up we have TomTom North America U.S.A. [iTunes Link], which if you don’t mind dropping Canada from your drive can save you some cash — $49.99. Not too shabby! Again, if you don’t care about Canada, grab the US-only version quick as the reduced app is only available until December 31st.

This next one will be painful for some of you as the game was recently released for $10, a whopping $5 higher than it currently is being offered… Super Monkey Ball 2 [iTunes Link] is now on sale for only $4.99