Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Demographics Is Destiny

Apple sold 1,000,000 iPhone 3Gs in a weekend.

Allow me to repeat that: Apple sold 1,000,000 iPhone 3Gs in a weekend.

If you haven’t got it already, it’s time to move your head to this place: iPhone OS is Apple’s mainstream platform for 2012 and beyond. It’s a bold prediction, but the numbers seem fairly clear.

There are 28m Mac OS X machines in the field. There are already at least 7m iPhones (25% of the total number of Macs), and Apple continues to hold to their aim of selling 10m iPhones by end 2008. Further, Apple doesn’t break down iPod sales figures by model so we have no idea how many iPod touch units are in the field. iPhone OS is already a major part of Apple’s platform business. I’m also willing to bet that Apple will easily surpass the 10m target this year.

None of this is to say Mac OS X is going away. There will always be plenty of tasks that can’t be done or are agonising to do on a machine with a 3.5″ screen and less storage than your digital camera. However, iPhone OS is undoubtedly going to be a major force in Apple’s business for decades to come.

Put this another way: my iPhone app, Exposure, has picked up on average 3,200 new users per day since the App Store opened. Exposure already has twice as many users as FlickrExport for Aperture.

These are crazy numbers.

[Update: corrected number of existing iPhones to be $NumberAnnouncedAtWWDC + $OneMeeeeeliiooonnniPhone3GsOnFirstWeekend]

Is that 1 mill worldwide? - if so i’d like to see what they sold in the states and compare that to last years sales.

Is 1 million across 12(?) countries a lot?

3,200 * 6 = you buying the drinks!

Fraser, I’m sure you won’t divulge but I would love to know what your percentage of sales are premium vs. free. Thats one of the issues with 10M apps downloaded since launch, it doesn’t really give an idea of how many of those were paid vs. free.

> Fraser, I’m sure you won’t divulge but I would love to know what your percentage of sales are premium vs. free

I think Fraser’s Twitter stream holds the answers you seek.

> Is 1 million across 12(?) countries a lot?

In 3 days? Er, yeah.

Actually, they’re predicting more sales than that. Apple predicts 10m iPhones IN 2008, not total across 2007 and 2008.

Quick question? How do you know how many times your app has been downloaded? The counter in the App Store is still at 0 for all apps for me… is there something I’m missing in iTunes Connect or something?

Doesn’t Nokia sell something like a million phones a day worldwide? For the worldwide launch, I am actually surprised they didn’t sell more.

Still agree it is now a BIG part of their business!

@ Gram

But Apple is building a platform, Nokia currently only sells single phones.

@Gram & Thomas:

Nokia does sell a bit over one million cellphones a day worldwide, but that’s with 130+ models; that’s an average of about 7,700 per model per day. The iPhone sold a million in 3 days with 3 models, an average of over 111,000 per model per day.

Obviously, this rate is no sustainable, but it does give a good indication of the demand for the iPhone. Once things settle down, iPhone sales are expected to be about twice that of the iPod.

Hi. Like Alex, I’d also like to know where you got those stats from.

How many copies of Aperture are in the field?

@Gruff

“about twice that of the iPod”, where are you getting that?

Apple has stated a publicly that is expecting to sell 10M+ iPhones this year. Last year Apple sold over 52M iPods. I am not seeing a major iPod sales slow down nor do I expect iPhone to sell several times Apple’s goal. Thus I am quite doubtful of your prediction.

I was told by a tuned-in developer in Apple’s iPhone dev program that Apple said they would only report app download figures *monthly* — implying no developer would know anything till Aug 11

so, repeat, Fraser - where you gettin’ your numbers??

It seems to me that the iPhone OS is always either (a) going to be a cut-down version of OSX, or (b) OSX. I think it’s more likely that iPhones will, in essence, become Macs, than that iPhone OS (as distinct from OS X) will become Apple’s primary OS. (After all, there’s what — 100,000,000 iPods out there, and iPod OS didn’t become Apple’s primary OS.)

Also bear in mind that Apple’s iPhone margins will probably be relatively small within a year or two when Apple has some vaguely plausible competition from Nokia, HTC, Android, et al — versus the relatively half-baked software running on decent hardware we see today.

I’m quite willing to accept that there will be no clear division between Apple’s computer OS and its phone OS by 2012 — and possibly a lot sooner (if the Air were a cellular device and offered VoIP via BlueTooth headsets with the lid closed… well we’d almost be there today).

So, perhaps there’ll be an Apple OS that succeeds OS X and iPhone OS (and sounds better than OS XI) which is Apple’s primary OS, but I think that’s quite distinct from iPhone OS becoming Apple’s primary OS.

He’s probably getting the numbers from the app calling home in some fashion. Since Exposure logs into Flickr, it probably has a website component that handles the Flickr API and translates it into a more compact data-stream for the phone; since the user must authenticate with Flickr to give Fraser’s app permission, he can easily keep a running count of how many users have given such permission.

One iPhone App Store reviewer pointed out two applications where the download counts of the free and enhanced versions could be computed. It turns out that for about the first day of operation, the download counts were displayed publicly, and he jotted down the numbers before they were all zeroed out.

I don’t remember the raw numbers but I do remember the paid versus free ratio was 1/42 for one of them and 1/48 for the other. Obviously we can’t speak for Fraser but the consistency of the numbers between two applications was interesting.

Clearly only Fraser actually knows his figures, but I though it would be interesting to point out that someone did the numbers and came out with actual datal.

Tonio,
The point is that there will be more people using iPhones than there are using Macs. More people will be buying thier apps at impulse prices from iTunes (oops, I mean the App store), their music from iTunes, getting their mail through MobileMe, and so on.

The OS with the most users is the primary OS.
More people use the phone than use windows!

More people use iPods than use Macs. What’s your point?

In the desktop publishing days, you used one Mac to make 100,000 printed magazines. Now you use one Mac to make a website that is viewed by 100,000 iPhones. One Mac in a recording studio and 100,000 iPods out there listening. That’s definitely how it should be.

Wait until they do an iPhone OS device that can do HDTV, Web, books, all at their full resolution, all touchable. They will sell a bajillion million of those.

Richard,

In order to use Exposure, you need to authorise it for your Flickr account. Flickr logs each API authorisation and provides those statistics to app developers, so I’d imagine Fraser is simply comparing API authorisations for each app.

Best,

N

The nice thing about it is that Windows Mobile will finally die! yay! (I’m still traumatized by my last winmo phone…)

Just for perspective, Nokia sells, on avergage, 1.2 million phones PER DAY!

I agree with what everyone has said, except those I don’t agree with. They really need to get their facts straight. It’s not rocket science, what they are saying is obviously wrong. But the people who I agree with are right. However, one of the people who I don’t agree with made a good point somewhere, and I agree with that, but it doesn’t contradict my position that those who I agree with have won the argument.

To Bruce’s point above, how many Mac users do you think own Aperture, never mind use FlickrExport for it?

I’m not debating your theory (I think you might be right), but I don’t think using stats from a ~US$30 plugin for a US$200 piece of software that would be of interest to pro’s and prosumers is the best way to support your theory. If you offered FlickrExport for iPhoto for free, then you might be a little more accurate.