Another Apple Billion, This One’s Extra Special

While numbers may not tell the entire story, but they’ll flabbergast you anyway.

Wall Street says Apple’s about to sell their 1 billionth iPhone some time in July 2016.

It seems like yesterday when Apple launched its first iPhone on June 29th 2007, It garnered market hysteria like no other device ever launched, and has seen unprecedented success ever since.

Success? By the end of 2015 Apple had sold 896 million iPhones and if the Wall Street estimates are to be believed they’ll add around 50 million more sales to the tally during the last quarter of the present financial year (April 2016).
So that means if the iPhone SE succeeds, even partially and adds to the runs scored by the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, Apple could make the billion-iPhone mark in July.

Even though the sales per quarter have reduced for Apple this season but it is still in a very comfortable position to reach the 1 billion-device milestone.

Here’s some more trivia. Apple hit the mid-way mark (500 million iPhones) in March 2014. So it took them about 7 years to get to hit the halfway mark, and now they’d have sold the next 500 million in a little over (only) 2 years!

Since we’re on a trivia roll, here are some more. The “billion” mark is not new to Apple. They reached the billion mark for the Apple family of devices in November 2014. They crossed the “Billion” mark for their active user base (users who engaged with Apple Services). They’ve achieved upwards of 10 billion iTunes Music Store downloads, and more than 50 billion iOS app downloads in 2013.

Now for the not-so-good news. The picture at Apple is not completely rosy — not only has there been a recurring decline in iPad sales, now Morgan Stanley predicts a slowdown in iPhone sales in the neighborhood of about the 5.5%.
Chinese markets have not picked up at the desired haste, and iPhone sales have been tapering off to around 50 million iPhones per quarter from a high of 74 million device sales it had achieved earlier.

But all is not lost. Here’s another story:

For this angle, I had to borrow someone’s rather complicated scientific calculator (and an A4 sheet) to run this calculation. The mind boggled more than once, so I was forced to guzzle Mint Lattes at regular intervals just to unwrap the synapses of my mind.

Before I start the story, let me reveal the spoiler, Apple makes three times more money every year than the entire Indian Railways does, just via their iPhone sales.

Now I know, that those of our non-India readers mayn’t grasp that enormity, so let me spell a little background numbers out to you about the Indian Railways -

India had 1.31 billion people, as of 2015.
The Indian Railways carried 8.397 billion passengers in 2015 (which equates to more than 23 million passengers every day), and over 1 billion tons of freight across 71,000 miles of track. And for all those trains, tracks, people, and boxes, the Railways earned USD 24 billion in 2015.

Apple produced fanciful iPhones and earned about USD 77 billion (roughly averaged out sales over the 9 years of sales to hit 1 billion iPhones at assumed value of $650 per iPhone).

Phew! I don’t even want to know about the App Store, and the iTunes Store, and the iPad, and the Macs. Christ, no! There’s not enough mint out there.

As I wind down, I hope Apple does something spectacular to commemorate the Billionth iPhone’s sale — maybe they’ll even fulfill Steve Jobs’ dream to dress up as Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and give the billionth customer a tour of the Apple headquarters along with a plethora of goodies. Who knows!

Originally published at Chip-Monks.