Apple 500,000,000 iPhones Sold Ping!
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Posted on 03/27/2014 2:36:57 AM PDT by Swordmaker
“Apple has been known to mark big numerical milestones, celebrating the 50 billionth download from its App Store last May and the 30th anniversary of the Mac earlier this year,” Mark Rogowsky reports for Forbes. “But it appears to have quietly let a big one pass within the last few weeks as somewhere on earth, the 500 millionth iPhone was sold. Despite much consternation in the media that the high-end of the market is reaching saturation, this data point demonstrates that iPhone sales continue to accelerate for Apple even if the rate of that acceleration is less breathtaking than it had been in the past.”
“When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs did something rare for the company. He put out a sales goal of 10 million for 2008,” Rogowsky reports. “There were doubters. “They’re going to have a difficult time” making it, Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research, told the New York Times in March of that year. Snyder pointed out Nokia sold more phones in a week than Apple had sold up to that point.”
(Apple, incidentally, sells that many iPhones every 2 days currently. By 2012 Snyder was calling Nokia a ‘dinosaur’ and, to complete the reversal of fortune, Apple sold more iPhones last quarter than Nokia has sold Lumias ever),” Rogowsky reports. “Oh, and back in 2008, Apple exceeded Jobs forecast with 13.7 million phones sold… The launch of the next iPhone seems likely to again fall in September, despite numerous rumors placing it earlier in summer. But either way, the 600 millionth iPhone will arrive very near the end of Apple’s fiscal year and around what would be the typical launch window.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In a perfect world, the next quote you’d hear from the following geniuses would be, “You want fries with that?”
• ”[iPhone] just doesn’t matter anymore. There are now alternatives to the iPhone, which has been introduced everywhere else in the world. It’s no longer a novelty.” – Eamon Hoey, Hoey and Associates, April 30, 2008
• “We are not at all worried. We think we’ve got the one mobile platform you’ll use for the rest of your life. [Apple] are not going to catch up.” – Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft Mobile Communications Group Product Manager, April 01, 2008
• “Microsoft, with Windows Mobile/ActiveSync, Nokia with Intellisync, and Motorola with Good Technology have all fared poorly in the enterprise. We have no reason to expect otherwise from Apple.” – Peter Misek, Canaccord Adams analyst, March 07, 2008
• ”[Apple should sell 7.9 million iPhones in 2008]… Apple’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year is optimistic.” – Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein Research analyst, February 22, 2008
• “What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much… Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious.” – Laura Goldman, LSG Capital, May 21, 2007
• Motorola’s then-Chairman and then-CEO Ed Zander said his company was ready for competition from Apple’s iPhone, due out the following month. “How do you deal with that?” Zander was asked at the Software 2007 conference. Zander quickly retorted, “How do they deal with us?” – Ed Zander, May 10, 2007
• “The iPhone is going to be nothing more than a temporary novelty that will eventually wear off.” – Gundeep Hora, CoolTechZone Editor-in-Chief, April 02, 2007
• “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” – John C. Dvorak, Bloated Gas Bag, March 28, 2007
• ”Even if [the iPhone] is opened up to third parties, it is difficult to see how the installed base of iPhones can reach the level where it becomes a truly attractive service platform for operator and developer investment.” – Tony Cripps, Ovum Service Manager for Mobile User Experience, March 14, 2007
• ”I’m more convinced than ever that, after an initial frenzy of publicity and sales to early adopters, iPhone sales will be unspectacular… iPhone may well become Apple’s next Newton.” – David Haskin, Computerworld, February 26, 2007
• “There’s an old saying — stick to your knitting — and Apple is not a mobile phone manufacturer, that’s not their knitting… I think people overreacted to it — there was not a lot of tremendously new stuff if you think about it.” – Greg Winn, Telstra’s operations chief, February 15, 2007
• “Consumers are not used to paying another couple hundred bucks more just because Apple makes a cool product. Some fans will buy [iPhone], but for the rest of us it’s a hard pill to swallow just to have the coolest thing.” – Neil Strother, NPD Group analyst, January 22, 2007
• “I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone… I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful)… So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.” – Richard Sprague, Microsoft Senior Marketing Director, January 18, 2007
• “The iPhone’s willful disregard of the global handset market will come back to haunt Apple.” – Tero Kuittinen, RealMoney.com, January 18, 2007
• “[Apple's iPhone] is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine… So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.” – Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, January 17, 2007
• “The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant… Apple is unlikely to make much of an impact on this market… Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.” – Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg, January 15, 2007
• “iPhone which doesn’t look, I mean to me, I’m looking at this thing and I think it’s kind of trending against, you know, what’s really going, what people are really liking on, in these phones nowadays, which are those little keypads. I mean, the Blackjack from Samsung, the Blackberry, obviously, you know kind of pushes this thing, the Palm, all these… And I guess some of these stocks went down on the Apple announcement, thinking that Apple could do no wrong, but I think Apple can do wrong and I think this is it.” – John C. Dvorak, Bloated Gas Bag, January 13, 2007
• “I am pretty skeptical. I don’t think [iPhone] will meet the fantastic predictions I have been reading. For starters, while Apple basically established the market for portable music players, the phone market is already established, with a number of major brands. Can Apple remake the phone market in its image? Success is far from guaranteed.” – Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, January 11, 2007
• ”Apple will launch a mobile phone in January, and it will become available during 2007. It will be a lovely bit of kit, a pleasure to behold, and its limited functionality will be easy to access and use. The Apple phone will be exclusive to one of the major networks in each territory and some customers will switch networks just to get it, but not as many as had been hoped. As customers start to realise that the competition offers better functionality at a lower price, by negotiating a better subsidy, sales will stagnate. After a year a new version will be launched, but it will lack the innovation of the first and quickly vanish. The only question remaining is if, when the iPod phone fails, it will take the iPod with it.” – Bill Ray, The Register, December 26, 2006
• “The economics of something like [an Apple iPhone] aren’t that compelling.” – Rod Bare, Morningstar analyst, December 08, 2006
• “Apple is slated to come out with a new phone… And it will largely fail…. Sales for the phone will skyrocket initially. However, things will calm down, and the Apple phone will take its place on the shelves with the random video cameras, cell phones, wireless routers and other would-be hits… When the iPod emerged in late 2001, it solved some major problems with MP3 players. Unfortunately for Apple, problems like that don’t exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren’t clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good.” – Michael Kanellos, CNET, December 07, 2006
• “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” – Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, November 16, 2006
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Woo-hoo!
Back in my rural Tennessee county, I was the first cellular phone agent, back in the 90s. The phones were in a bag, with a mag mount antenna for the car. Hand-held phones worked only near a cell site. There were only one or two sites for the entire county.
Today, I am in the Philippines, where a mobile phone is a standard accessory with everyone from early teen on up.
It no longer depends on having above average money. Even the poor have their mobile.
It amazes how the new hi-tech systems/sites can handle the volume. We are never out of range or capacity.
Apple doesn't make much money off Internet usage - it makes most of it off selling Idevices. Unfortunately, Apple's market share is shrinking, and its year-to-year quarterly earnings comparisons (total earnings, not EPS, which has been goosed by share buybacks) have been negative for 5 straight quarters. After the plateau comes the whoosh down, as all portable touch screen devices deal with industry-wide price compression by either cutting prices or remaining above the fray and losing significant unit volumes. Either way, bottom line profits get taken to the woodshed.
Yikes! Apple is going out of business soon! Sell your stock, get rid of all your iDevices, immediately!
Oh wait a minute ... I forgot ... Apple has been “going out of business” for the last 30+ years! ... LOL ...
Uh, no... There can’t be enough travelers to do that. It just means that people with iOS devices USE their devices. People with Android not so much. Travel has little to do with it.
Not to worry. . . Apple is taking home 87% of all phone profits.
BUT ... here’s the chart I want to see, and perhaps you can find it for us. How long before these Apple-haters DIE OFF!
It’s sure a bore dealing with their mental illness all the time.
I’ve always been curious about this phenomenon. We have people who find Apple’s products absolutely amazing ... AND THEN ... we run across the very curious phenomenon of the “Apple-haters” who occupy themselves running around on the Internet and forums seeking out customers who find Apple’s products “amazing” — and incessantly telling them how much they hate Apple products and “Apple is going out of business and/or losing money!”
I think it’s some kind of mental disorder of some sort.
I guess they're complementary to the Apple fanatics who populate these forums talking about anything non-Apple is for the birds. I'm neither an Android nor an Apple lover or hater. I'm just pointing to the inevitable trajectory of consumer electronics products. Prices come down, and everybody sees its profits slashed to ribbons. It's happened to every consumer electronics item starting from radios way back when. What is astonishing is the way in which competition in the sector has accelerated.
Not going to help Apple as total industry phone profits plunge. Certainly hasn't helped Apple increase its earnings over these past 5 quarters.
Besides, since nobody breaks out profits by product, this is just a guess by an analyst with roughly the same credibility as the success of his overall buy and sell ratings. I'd say Tavis McCourt, who came up with the 87% figure, qualifies as a permabull, since he had a buy rating on Apple's stock at $700. He was also a permabull on Blackberry, back in the day:
Analysts can make repeated bad calls for years — with no consequences. They just keep covering a company and pull big money for themselves from their investment bank. Nobody even calls them on their bad track record. Why do these guys deserve to keep their jobs in this situation? And some of them even get to go on TV continuing to espouse their lousy point of view.
Last Friday, I was watching Bloomberg TV and have to commend them for calling out one analyst. The analyst in question is Tavis McCourt of Morgan Keegan, based in Nashville, TN, who covers Research in Motion (RIMM). Jon Ehrlichman says: “Please correct me if I’m wrong but I was looking back over the Bloomberg and it says you’ve had an outperform rating on the stock since September 2008. That’s during period in which RIM has lost half its value while the S&P has fought its way back to even. Can you clarify that?”
Tavis’ response: “… No, that’s accurate… um… some stocks go up, some stocks go down. They’ve done much better internationally than what I would have expected and much worse in the US.”
Betty Liu: “Right, but I think Jon makes a good point that you’ve had this outperform rating for a long time on RIM. What would it take to make you change that?”
Tavis: [now angry and somewhat dismissive of the direct criticism] “yeah yeah, look… this would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards…. But, we don’t… and, uh, and, uh, so… you know, I think what it would take would be if there was any meaningful slowing in RIM’s international growth.”
“This would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards.” Well, Tavis, I think the point was that you’ve done a really bad job looking forward for over 2 years now. And it’s not like he upgraded the stock and then back-tracked. He just did nothing. He kept saying RIM was an “outperform” for the entire ride down to a loss of half the company’s market value. And now he says it’s still an “outperform.” What is any investor supposed to make of that?
Apple has INEVITABLY ... been “going out of business” for over 30 years ... LOL ...
You’re starting to remind me of the “Global Warming” advocates.
I'd say one has nothing to do with the other.
Mobile Phones Before & After the Apple iPhone
The one has nothing to do with the other in terms of the subject matter — but the “Boy crying ‘wolf’” is a “methodology” that APPLIES TO BOTH!!
And ...after 30+ years ... there’s no question it applies to Apple ... :-) ...
One big “problem” Apple has with its iPhones is their longevity. Several years ago my wife got an iPhone 4. She used it a few years then gave it to her mom and upgraded to a iPhone 4s. Later she upgraded to a 5, her mom got the 4s, and I got the 4. There is nothing at all wrong with the 4. Because it has been in a case it’s entire life (mostly otterbox), the thing still looks brand freaking new. So, we have a family with 3 phones, and only one actual purchaser. I can’t even say that I particularly have battery issues yet on this handmedown phone. It lasts all day, and I charge it overnight.
Gosh, sounds like Apple’s *dooooooomed!* /s
And “50 billionth download from its App Store”, kind of a lot, really.
500 million iPhones, out of approximately 7 billion living humans, astonishing.
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