Demographics Is Destiny
A post in which I consider where the world is going, post-iPhone. It’s hilarious to look back on these numbers in 2020 and see how amazed I was at numbers which, today, would be considered utterly trivial.
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]