Since Apple Incorporated’s new iPhone contract requirements have rendered the gadgets to be quite hard to be offered as Christmas gifts, everybody is now speculating on how much the company lost as a result of those contract terms.

In order to purchase an iPhone from a retail store in the United States, one must sign a two-year contract with AT&T, which back in 2007, was not a requirement and everybody was able to buy a smartphone as a gift for friends and family.

Minneapolis-based middle-market investment banking firm Piper Jaffray has estimated that Apple sold 3.8 million iPhones in December 2008, Andrew Murphy, an analyst at the firm, having stated that the company could have sold 300,000 to 400,000 more gadgets had it been easier for people to buy them as gifts for somebody else.

Consequently, given that the 8GB version of the iPhone is priced at $199-with the two-year contract with AT&T-Murphy said that Apple could have made $80 million from the aforementioned sales.

Still, according to Piper Jaffray, that amount is not quite close to reality, since the firm reckons that Apple sells the iPhone to carriers for an average price of $630, which makes the unrealized revenue for the company jump to $250 million.

Nevertheless, loss or no loss, with the holiday season having departed, Apple has some bigger issues to attend to, such as the fact that the company’s CEO Steve Jobs has recently announced he would be taking a five-month leave of absence by virtue of health problems.

The news of Jobs’ declining health has resulted in the company’s stock price going down and nobody knows what these five months would further bring forth for Apple.