Apple announced massive ($5.41 billion in sales, $818 million revenue) quarterly numbers today, with 1.13 million portable Macs and 634,000 desktop Macs sold. They also shipped 9.8 million iPods.
Only two days of iPhone sales were included in the quarter, and Apple rather cagily says that they sold 270,000 “iPhones and Apple-branded and third-party iPhone accessories.” AT&T announced on Monday that they’d done 146,000 iPhone activations, so a reasonable guess on the opening two-day numbers is probably around 200,000 iPhones sold.
- UPDATE: According to an Apple spokesman, the language in the financial report refers to the revenue not unit shipments. In other words, Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first two days and AT&T activated 146,000 of them. Presumably the remainder were activated in the follow few days.
Nonetheless, sales have continued apace according to my own local research and what I’m reading online. Additionally, as one of the people who purchased an iPhone after the two-day opening bell, I can tell you that I remain utterly smitten with it.
And it’s not just Ty off on another pie-in-the-sky, pro-Apple flight of fancy either. EVERYONE who I’ve showed the iPhone to is blown away by it. I don’t know if they’re “I’m gonna run out and spend $600” blown away by it, but they’re either quite impressed by it or they’re all really incredibly good at faking envy.
In the long run, I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about in the iPhone business. Just like with the original iPod, these things are going to get even better, and I would not be at all surprised to see an iPhone nano with phone, picture, texting, and iPod functions for $300-$400 in the next few months. Given that the iPod nano outsells the regular video iPod by a very wide margin, I think such a move borders on a no-brainer. If it’s in time, it could also be the hit of the Christmas season.
Five days along now with my iPhone here’s what I’ve discovered:
- • It is the best way to look at pictures that I’ve found. Flicking from picture to picture and pinching with your fingers to zoom in or out is incredibly satisfying. The image quality is spectacular, too. As far as pictures I prefer my iPhone to my 20″ Cinema Display.
• It’s a great phone. Your mileage may vary of course, but I’ve had no problems with AT&T’s coverage and, subjectively, I think the call quality is actually better than my Motorola E815 on Verizon.
• The contact information on the phone is superbly organized and syncs beautifully with Address Book on my Mac. This is so much better than the E815 that I’m reminded of George Will’s comparison of Babe Ruth to the rest of the baseball players of his era: “Like Mt. Everest in Kansas.” That’s how the iPhone feels overall, too.
• I like that web authors can now embed tel: tags that will allow the iPhone to automatically call a phone number. For regular (non-phone) web browsers it just looks normal. For the iPhone it appears as a link. Cool!
• I’ve typed up several SMS text messages (all AT&T plans include 200 messages a month) and found the virtual keyboard to be significantly faster than the E815’s phone keypad method (where in to type the letter “c” for example you’d hit the number 2 three times). According to an iPhone typing test I took, I’m getting about 24 words a minute. That’s nowhere near what I can do on a full-size keyboard of course, but it’s probably 10-12 times faster than the Motorola. I may learn to like texting.
• Being able to add events into my calendar and have them sync into my regular iCal calendar makes all the difference in the world. I could carry my calendar with me before with my iPod but I couldn’t modify the entries. That’s only half useful. Now that I can change things? ENTIRELY useful.
• Like with the E815, I doubt I will use the built-in camera very much. Two megapixels isn’t getting it done for me and lack of any optical zoom renders most shots difficult. I guess I’m glad it’s there, but if I need a picture, I’ll be using my Canon Digital Elph.
• YouTube is an amazing waste of time. I won’t say it’s without its virtues, but it’s pretty close. Then again, what’s not to love about a laughing baby or a skateboarding dog? (And, OK, the Ronaldinho videos are mind-blowing.)
• The stock and weather widgets are reasonably useful but slow to update on AT&T’s Edge network. On a Wi-Fi, they’re fine.
• I’ve not used the World Clock, Alarm, Stopwatch or Timer more than one in the last five days. I’m glad the functionality is there, but I’ve yet to see much use. Also, the Alarm that plays for the timer always seems to revert to Marimba instead of holding whatever ringtone setting I give it.
• I like that the iPhone Notes can be emailed. I wish they could be synced as well. And I agree with other commentators who say that the font, Marker Felt, should be taken out and shot.
• I’m eagerly awaiting the opportunity, which will probably come in November when I transfer my main line from Verizon, to use Visual Voicemail. Thus far, I’ve not had the chance.
• The iPhone is a decent email device. Since I use IMAP for the accounts, it syncs perfectly with Apple Mail and my web mail, and I love being able to check and respond to email on the go.
• Safari on the iPhone is a hit-or-miss affair. Some of the iPhone-specific web sites that have cropped up lately are cool, offering some features that went a-missing (tip calculator, chess, etc.) from Apple. At the same time, while you get the real world wide web on the iPhone not some baby Internet or specially formatted web pages, there is no way in which this experience is better than sitting in front a 20″ Cinema Display and seeing the same web page, except one: The iPhone is portable.
• I’m going to guess that the iPhone makes a decent iPod. It does a great job with video. I’ve tried video podcasts and TV shows and they’re terrific. The iPhone is a marvelous video player. But I’ve not really used it as a music player, and I’m not sure that I will. At 8 GB, it’s like a large nano so it just won’t hold that many of the 1700 plus songs that I rate among my favorites. I’m not saying it’s bad, mind you, just that I have a hard time envisioning it being my primary music player. God knows that if it could be, I’d ditch my video iPod altogether.
So…worth $600? At this point, a resounding “YES!” We don’t know precisely how many iPhones Apple sold in the opening two days [well, we do now—see update above], but I for one am not the least bit concerned. They’re going to sell a lot more.