I'm thinking this is it: the huge amount of more casual Verizon buyers — the ones whose arrival to the App Store I’ve been eagerly awaiting — are far more likely to wait for their contracts to expire.
Most of the people I know who are on Verizon and are Mac focused or Tech savvy have either an iPad or iPod Touch, and already have the apps they want.
Also, Instapaper is pretty darn geeky in the grand scheme of things - It's somewhere between RSS readers and Dropbox in terms of non-technical user acceptance.
I've got both my parents using it, mainly just as a file sharing service (drag file into dropbox, get public URL, paste in email). It's easier for them to understand than a file sharing site like Rapidshare.
I've gotten some of the least techie people I know using Dropbox. It's surprisingly one of the few new tech products that's really just caught on with computer users of almost every skill level and sophistication.
Instapaper does seem geeky, but if it's always in the top charts for paid news apps I think it's safe to say that it's pretty mainstream in the iOS ecosystem.
I've been thinking that the iPod Touch is a kind of weird market segment for a while, yet it's been selling strongly.
They're basically aiming for people to young or poor to get an iPhone, a market that the ever decreasing price of Android phones should start to eat into, as will a low price iPhone if recent rumors are to be believed, to the point of it being an evolutionary dead end.
I hadn't considered the impact of iPhone being carrier locked in the US. I wonder how this will impact sales and development interest from Apple.
Most of the people I know who are on Verizon and are Mac focused or Tech savvy have either an iPad or iPod Touch, and already have the apps they want.
Also, Instapaper is pretty darn geeky in the grand scheme of things - It's somewhere between RSS readers and Dropbox in terms of non-technical user acceptance.