(Image courtesy of onethings.com)

We've all heard the endless onslaught of Verizon iPhone rumors.  But lost in all the talk, is what exactly would happen if the iPhone actually sold on Verizon's network.  Would it be a big event?  Would Verizon's network survive?  John Gruber of Daring Fireball offers some insight in his latest column.

He starts off by painting the scene of Amy Thomson's reporting for Bloomberg on June 29 being correct, and that Verizon will start selling the iPhone in January of next year, and that it will also be a CDMA iPhone.  The details would be close to what we have now, but of course CDMA instead of GSM.

What would that first release day look like?  People in lines extending around corners upon corners?  Or not quite so much, since so many have one with AT&T already?  His take is that it will certainly be an event, and depending on how many Verizon customers have been biding their time, waiting for this day, Verizon could possibly sell A LOT of iPhones in the opening days.

But as we know with a lot of tech rumors, the problem is keeping them secret.  The biggest area is a weakness within the chain of production.  As Gruber points out, if you're planning on selling millions of iPhones, you need a lot of parts, which would involve a lot of suppliers.  So if something's going to happen then, production signs will also certainly start to heat up, as has been the case lately.  Along those lines, Apple would also probably have to be quite aggressive to meet the demands for such a device.  With 7-10 days still being the shipment time for an iPad and three weeks for the iPhone 4, January is not that far off.

Granted CDMA could just mean the iPhone would be coming for other parts of the world, or perhaps even all of it, as Apple continues to try and increase it's market share.  He ends with an interesting interview excerpt between Steven Levy and Steve Jobs from 2004 on that very notion:

If that's so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple's recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent?  Jobs has a theory about that, too.  Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation that protecting its turf.  "The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly," says Jobs.  "Who ended up running the company?  Sales guys.  At the critical juncture in the late '80's, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits.  They made obscene profits for several years.  And their products became mediocre.  And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95.  They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens."

So perhaps Apple has been merely biding its time, grabbing market share, before waiting to expand?  What do you think readers?  What would an iPhone on Verizon release day look like here in the U.S.?  Or perhaps Sprint?  Feel free to leave your predictions below!

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