Apple executives made a startling revelation  during yesterday's quarterly earnings conference call. When speaking about the number of iPhones sold since the June launch, they revealed that roughly one sixth of all iPhones were purchased for the express purpose of being unlocked.

The comment came while COO Tim Cook was discussing the success of the latest iPhone price cut when he noted that by Apple's own estimate, about 250,000 iPhones were purchased with the express purpose of being unlocked and run independent of AT&T. When compared with Cook's earlier assessment that Apple had moved 1.4million iPhones this year, that means roughly 18 percent of iPhones are being unlocked.

23 Oct 2007

What's more, Cook noted that many of those purchases were made after the price cut, suggesting that interest in unlocking the iPhone is getting stronger.

This comes hot on the heels of Orange planning an unlocked iPhone model for November and Steve Jobs announcing an SDK for native iPhone apps early next year.  To top it all off, the iPhone hacking groups learn more about the device each day and, if Apple's "hands off" declaration is to be believed, future updates could be less likely to run into "bricking" issues while patches to fix those issues could come even faster.

It seems that Apple may be finally starting to admit that the genie is out of the bottle.

I'm guessing AT&T and T-Mobile are not too happy right now.