We’re just minutes into Apple’s quarterly earnings call, and the iPhones sales numbers for the first fiscal quarter of 2009 (which ran from Oct. 1, 2008 to Dec. 31st, 2008) are already in. Over the past 3 months, Apple has sold over 4,363,000 iphones.
Compared to the 2.3 million iPhones sold in their fiscal first quarter of last year, this number is astronomical. Compared to the 6.9 million iPhones sold last quarter, however, it seems relatively low. While it may be that the demand caused by the 3G model of the iPhone may be wearing off, I’d expected Christmas purchases to pull sales on par or above Q4 of 2008, along the lines of the sudden App Store sales boost we saw in December.
More on Apple’s quarterly earnings at CrunchGear.
full disclosure, I do work for Nokia.
Huge kudos to Apple, I love the iPhone, but just to put this in perspective Nokia ships 1 Million phones a day, not all smart phones, but increasingly they have safari based web browsers & email. The next couple of years are going to be very interesting for the mobile web.
Clearly the US smart phone market is dominated by the iPhone but from a global standpoint IMHO Nokia is going to have a very significant impact on the mobile web.
It’s also important to point out that there are lots of opportunity for SMS enhanced services as Twitter demonstrates, and that’s a huge opportunity. SMS is probably the most ubiquitous communication technology on the planet. There’s about 1Billion Nokia phones with SMS capability globally.
Again, this is all my opinion, and does not represent the opinion of Nokia.
From the perspective of a developer, 1M per day vs. 1M per week does not trump the ease of developing apps for the iPhone.
We are a small company with limited resources and were able to deploy our a localized app in 79 countries with the iPhone. Wouldn’t even contemplate to do this on the Nokia platform unless we had significant funding, and even then we would probably think twice of doing so.
The other juggernaut is that the iPhone is also an iPod.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Steffen fails to realize the global nature of the entrenched manufactures and their supply line. Apple will not be able to compete in the long term. They can’t source their parts for cheap enough because they don’t have the volume. AT&T significantly funded the manufacturing costs of the iPhone for Apple.
Be afraid IPhone, very afraid.
I was just about to post the same exact thing.
We’re going to stay small for awhile, sitting on the fence till some of the other mobile platforms show their face. Android is the most promising, but they lack millions of customers with a CC on file.
my comment was to @steffen. i agree with you.
Because “developers” are what traders on wall street care about. Get off your Apple high horse.
@Steffen I totally agree that cost of development is a huge consideration for developers. I think work Nokia is doing with Troll Tech (Nokia acquired them a little while ago) and the QT tool will help (to what degree I don’t know but worth investigating)
http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/
I think the change in the QT license from GPL to LGPL version 2.1 is a huge benefit to developers as well.
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/01/14/nokia-to-license-qt-under-lgpl/
That’s one iphone every 2 seconds!
Proud to say I am one of this 4.4 million! Heh.
I wonder how many of these owners will eventually write a post/rant like this ;)
http://www.jeremyhanks.com/2008/12/16/best-rant-of-all-time-seriously/
Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com
Personal Career Management
Its true the ATT network is the horrifying achielles heel of the iPhone.
I too have had more dropped calls in 4 months of owning an iPhone than 6 YEARS on verizon wireless. FFS verizon worked inside the elevator here at work when other networks dont. Verizon worked in underground parking garages. Maybe its too high a standard to expect?
Well the good new is when iPhone is released to verizon network AND you can get the thing for $99 then you will see 1 million iPhones a day shipping…. or at least a lot more…. dont say its not pozzible due to GSM vs CDMA they will have a hybrid iphone or something.
Apple is a great American company, because it was created in a capitalist country. It will recover from this slight downturn, and return stronger than ever!
Does anyone know what this brings the TOTAL iphones sold by Apple to be now?
17.3 Million iPhones.
Nokia is like Microsot, and Apple, well, is still Apple. Apple enjoy the luxury of having strong brand image in innovation, but will seeing themself in a fraction of smartphone market (especially in USA), while Nokia selling phone in every market segmen, in every country, in every price point, in every carrier, in every shop, every day. And they actually innovate too
The full filing says:
6.1million 1st Gen iPhones sold in the 5 quarters it was available.
6.9million 2nd Gen iPhones sold in it’s first quarter.
4.4million 2nd Gen iPhones sold in the last quarter.
That would be 17.4million in total.
Apple have never released any specific data on how many iPod Touches have been sold.
App Developers should be happy…In the last quater alone, 4.3 million in potential new customers.
I wonder how many iPod Touch’s have been sold? They’ve had to have as significant, if not bigger impact, on the App Store. I bought mine specifically for that reason.
A tribute to happy iPhone coders who succeeded :
http://www.app-store-vet.com
Regards,
Annie
So how many of these 4 mil iphones actually work?
My wife got one 10 days ago now on a Friday afternoon it was faulty when she turned it on at home (yes she knows now she should have checked it in the store but didn’t expect a new apple product to be faulty.) She is obviously very miss guided. Its been 10 days now with many calls to the Phone company & Apple still no replacement iphone.
Gotta love Apple they can ship them but they won’t replace them nor will the phone company yet. Oh Apple did offer a refurbished product to replace a brand new product that never worked, now that’s a great deal if your an absolute moron. They may have shipped over 4 mil iphones but how many actually worked properly would be a very interesting stat.