Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook said Monday that 250,000 of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones sold may have been bought by users with the intention of unlocking them, or modifying the device to work on a network other than AT&T's. Customers who aren't signing up with AT&T, Apple's approved service provider in the U.S., are preventing the two companies from collecting monthly mobile-phone fees. Analysts had estimated that between 10,000 and 100,000 iPhones had been unlocked since Apple began selling the device in June.

"I did not think it was that much," Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, told Bloomberg, describing the 250,000 figure as "huge." He predicted earlier this month that as many as 100,000 users had unlocked the devices.

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