I'm not wrong, though. Sure, the engineering costs are fairly small as a percentage of the cost of the device (a quick search suggests $18/chipset), but that's

I'm not wrong, though. Sure, the engineering costs are fairly small as a percentage of the cost of the device (a quick search suggests $18/chipset), but that's not the only costs involved. The power consumption of that chipset is not clear compared to the GSM chipsets that they use; battery life matters. The extra SKUs matter: if Apple is selling these phones directly (always a key part of their strategy, at least in the U.S.), how do they make sure that the customers buy the right one for their preferred carrier? Training in carrier plans and pricing matters: How much training do they have to do with their employees about the different rate plans for different carriers? Configuring a CDMA phone on the cellular network is also more work than plugging in the correct SIM. The training differences involved are substantial and fundamentally against the way that Apple works: as simple as can possibly be done. The quality of service/experience difference matters: would you care to explain to a customer why their buddy's iPhone on AT&T can browse the web while talking yet their "exact same iPhone" on Verizon can't? There are lots of other extra costs that may or may not be covered by having a CDMA version that could reach a few million extra CDMA subscribers. Worldwide, there's ~142M CDMA EVDO subscribers as of 4Q 2009 (via cdg.org) and ~506M GSM 3G subscribers. The worldwide market for CDMA phones is ~500M, whereas the equivalent GSM one is ~4B. Apple made the right choice. Here in Canada, Rogers's service doesn't suck (at least in the big cities), although their pricing sort of does (not enough competition). Bell and Telus switched to a shared GSM network (they're running both GSM/HSPA+ and CDMA until they can get enough of their customers switched to GSM phones to make it feasible to kill the older network). This was done mostly because they were preferred carrier for the Olympics this past year, and they didn't want all those Europeans roaming on the Rogers network, but it was done. I personally predict that when Verizon has a major LTE rollout (which is essentially GSM), there will be a Verizon iPhone.