iPhones not to scale
By using some fairly interesting IMEI collection, the folks at Mac Observer have found that Apple sold 10 million iPhones in 2008, reaching and potentially surpassing Steve’s original stated goal. By looking at phones sold over the last few months, Mac Observer’s “Apple Finance Board” found that the phone has gone through nine 1 million unit runs. Adding this to the known sales they found the total number was far above analyst expectations.
Apple has been buffeted of late by bad news and this little gem might just pump things up a bit – but don’t count on it. After falling for blog-based news (”Steve Jobs has shed his skin and exposed his lizard-like internal carapace!”) multiple times, I suspect folks investing in Apple are very wary.
What does this mean? Well, 10 million is miniscule in the phone market but it still means the iPhone has legs. This obviously takes into account the international sales now streaming through Asia and Europe. Now if only they could implement cut and paste…
If you stare in the middle long enough you’ll see an iPhone appear.
I was going to say something witty like that.
No so witty eh? I tried, but it didn’t work. I thought there is a 3D image in the above image. I actually got to see the images popup as 3D, but no single iPhone shown up. If you don’t know what I am talking about, check out google: magiceye
Thats awesome…
and still the world is waiting
what if the iphone is available worldwide !!!
10 million?
Wow, maybe that why Steve had that heart attack!
And the market keeps ignoring AAPL…
evry1 should buy some apple stock
cuz its going to skyrocket cuz of this
…well mabe not cuz the economy is doing terrible
Tufte would be proud of that graphic.
This is an interesting attempt at analyis but if you take a look at the actual spreadsheet they are using and the spread of the purported sequential numbers, it quickly is apparent that virtually every number ends in a multiple of 10 (only one exception and that is likely a typo). If these are randomly collected IMEI numbers then statistical analysis sez the phones are almostly certainly numbered by 10 and not by single units.
Would this reduce the analysis by 90% I would find that hard to believe as well but it certainly pokes a big hole in the initial claim as I read it…
You can take a look at the actual spreadsheet here
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pUwZATIrXuTeCVdJHkQY1Zg
If I read it correctly, it is almost a certainty the phones are numbered by individual units and the 9-10 million claim is out to lunch…. Good effort, but bad conclusion.
That’s about $4 billion revenues, plus residual from the App Store. With a market for $200 million plus smartphones sold per year, there is substantial room for growth. Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung are struggling – they don’t have the iTune and App store.
Wall Street is stuck in reverse. Apple is not dead. Neither is Jobs.
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
To put this in context Nokia sells over 1 million phones per day.
@ noh weigh
The IMEI numbers in the spreadsheet end in 0 because the last digit is not submitted/published for security/privacy purposes therefore zero is used even though the number is actually 0-9.
I looked at IMEI numbers retrospectively on the 1 generation iPhone compared to sales Apple reported and those were good predictors of unit sales.
I think the folks involved in this project and those that follow Apple closely know quite well what’s going on.
You make the statement “bad conclusion” and what you base it off of ( the last digit in multiples of 10) just shows your not very knowledgeable about IMEI numbers nor this effort.
You think the people involved wouldn’t think something was amiss IF all the numbers REALLY did end in zero???
C’mon you have be pretty dumb to think someone else id that dumb.
since you obviously don’t know much about IMEI numbers, Apples production run rates, retail store inventory tracking, etc.
Turley, you can call me dumb all you want, but the the fact is that the analysis isn’t warranted by the spread of the reported numbers even ignoring the last digit. Run it through SAS or Maple and statistically it also appears that large swaths of the potential 10000000 runs simply weren’t allocated from a probability standpoint. I understand you are an advocate of the article sponsored on seeking alpha. If you actually read the full thread at http://www.macobserver.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=69155
you will see that the keepers of the spreadsheet state that conclusions from the spreadsheet regarding sales are NOT warranted and that attempt at analysis for the 1st gen were NOT rewarding. If you actually read the thread you will see that the author of the article went in with an agenda to make the claim and get it picked up by Jim Goldman, et al. He didn’t understand the TACs and asked for assistance. The participants tried to point out that his conclusions weren’t warranted based on past analysis but his piece was a deliberate advocacy piece with the conclusion created first and an attempt to back it pieced together secondarily. All I am saying is that the data do not truly support the hypothesis without assumptions about that data that do not seem to be supported by a statistical analysis of the spread…
Not calling you dumb, you’re obviously very bright. I worked with Andy on the data to write this article. I was more confident in the NetApp OS share data, but IMEI numbers, checks at Apple stores, talks with BBY manager, all the data I had pointed to same general estimate. And it turned out to be right.
See here: my estimate was 6.8M for Q4- actual was 6.892M. Off by 92K. http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/10/19/apple-q4-earnings-smackdown/
this is not interesting
Wow thats mighty confusing!
http://www.anonymity.at.tc