Comment Re:Figures provided by analysts, not the companies (Score 1) 151
iPhones are activated by Apple. They know exactly how many are activated as soon as it happens. They even know how many owners the average iPhone has over its lifetime and how many iPhones the average owner has over time. HTC and Samsung have nothing like that.
How Apple knows who owns the SIM card inserted to the phone? Or is the iPhone so tangled with iTunes (and does that need an account? And does the account need some credit card information?) that they get the information from there?