“iPhone has become one of the most important, world-changing and successful products in history. It’s become more than a constant companion. iPhone is truly an essential part of our daily life and enables much of what we do throughout the day,” said Cook. “Last week we passed another major milestone when we sold the billionth iPhone. We never set out to make the most, but we’ve always set out to make the best products that make a difference. Thank you to everyone at Apple for helping change the world every day.”
There’s a lot you can say about Apple and the iPhone – but you can’t say the device didn’t cause a revolution in computing. This is a major milestone, and I’d like to congratulate all the men and women involved in the iPhone’s inception and further development. Apple is more than just the corporate facade and Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. There’s thousands of men and women working there, and this is a major achievement for them.
I personally think the iPhone was a game changer, but there’s always those Apple haters that will insist, ‘Well, hey… the LG Prada came first. Apple innovated nothing.’
Trying to put that figure into perspective, I just found out that in 2007, when the first iPhone was first introduced, Nokia had already sold 1.5 billion mobile phones, and was selling at a rate of 400+ million a year.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/267831/nokias-mobile-device-sale…
Certainly a higher number than I expected.
Sadly, look at what happened to Nokia… On the bright side, the same could happen to Apple.
That’s hardly a bright side. Would you rather there be no competition at all? Besides, that’s insensitive to those who need accessibility accommodation–something which Google, while they’ve come much further, are still struggling to do consistently and Microsoft don’t care about at all. So no, I’d not wish the death of Apple even if I didn’t like their products. To wish the death of a technology is short-sighted and smacks of a personal bias beyond all reason.
Someone / something would be spawning in it’s place, just as Apple spawned the iPhone to replace Nokia’s dominance.
I tend think what could have been had Atari and Commodore not been mismanaged into oblivion and Apple hadn’t gotten that boost from Microsoft.
So yeah at least Nokia actually made awesome devices and didn’t start the trend of 500+ phones. Sure they had a few flag ship ones, but gone are the days of cheap cell phones that worked well.
I was in the supermarket today. They had good reliable ZTE feature phones for AUD10 (USD7).
Edited 2016-07-29 10:06 UTC
IMHO, Nokia thought that they could carry on selling that number of devices every year post iPhone.
They made great devices. I use one every day(6310i).
If you can predict what will replace the smartphone as we now know it, then you will become very rich.
On the day after Facebook announced record figues especially for mobile advertising I am glad that my ‘goto’ phone is a dumb device.
Have we really moved on? I think we’ve gone backwards in that everything is a target for the Ad-slingers.
I’m a grumpy sixty something who is not the prime target for the Ad men yet I have more disposable income than pretty well any twenty something. Anything that is Advertised to me will never be purchased but hey, that’s probably just me.
The iPhone was a game changer but I’m not sure about the rules being used today.
The future problem for Apple will be selling hundreds of millions of $800 phones against very capable Android phones selling for $50. That will happen very soon.
The Nokia 6110 was USD900 in 1998. Nokia feature phones are now USD30.
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-cellphones-prices?bet…
Of course Nokia sold a lot of phones, since those were more affordable (and despite being more durable).
A better perspective would be to compare with other smartphones, where again Apple would be dwarfed by the numbers.
The early Nokia feature phones were at least as expensive as a top of the range iPhone 6s is now. The Nokia 6110 cost USD900 in 1998.
in 1998 mobile phones weren’t mainstream. in 2016 smartphones are.
affordable/expensive is a relative term, you have to compare the price with the rest of the market. back in 1998 there was no cheap option, any mobile phone was a luxury item.
That expression again… I do not think it means what you think it means.
Let me be clear: one billion is a big, important figure that cannot be ignored and celebrations are certainly in order, but the announcement comes two days after Apple reported selling 40.4 million iPhones during the last quarter (down from 47.5 million a year earlier) which, if nothing else, reminds us that sales (of any product) can’t keep expanding forever.
Important? Sure. Successful? Absolutely. Essential? Not so much and in fact a lot of people manage effortlessly without one — or any smartphone for that matter.
Want to call something world-changing? You better talk about the invention of the printing press then or, believe it or not, the washing machine (http://www.businessinsider.com/hans-rosling-washing-machine-2014-1?…). And the refrigerator. Let’s not forget about the refrigerator! 😉 (http://www.history-magazine.com/refrig.html)
RT.
It is and was world changing, the world has been completely transformed by the iPhone.
Information is more abundant and more accessible than it has ever been, the printing press lowered the price/access so that everyone could start reading. The iPhone inspired change across the industry and fully ushered in the information age.
I can perform a HD video call from the UK to someone in Japan, whilst being given navigation instructions by voice and notifications, whilst sending a high quality photo to a friend in the US.
It inspired android to be what it is today, allowing people of many incomes and locations around the world access to all of the information humankind has learnt so far, like the printing press it has lowered access to information for all.
Yes the iPhone needs the internet, it needs developers in the same way that the printing press needs authors and ink.
Look up a photo from 2006 in any city in the world and compare it to a photo from today, you will see an awful lot more people using a phone in 2016 than in 2006.
To me witnessing the before and after of the iPhone is as big as when i witnessed before and after the internet.
That is better. But internet is part of the smartphone. It is the reason why the Nokia 2005 smartphone failed.
We must remember that it wasn’t so much that Nokia’s 2005 smartphone failed because of the Internet, it was because we didn’t even really have fast enough connections for useful Internet via phone by then. Infrastructure came just a tad later so we had more than just crappy edge.
I think you are confusing US with the world. 🙂
Back in the early 2000, mobile phone networks and phones in US were far behind Europe/Finland and Japan. The mobile information age started before the iPhone in Europe/Japan and some years later in US, after iPhone.
By the time iPhone came to market, other companies had generations of phones with web browsers, cameras and touch screens. The only world changing innovation in iPhone was that it had a nicer UI than Symbian.
[q]I can perform a HD video call from the UK to someone in Japan, whilst being given navigation instructions by voice and notifications, whilst sending a high quality photo to a friend in the US.[\q]
Do you realize that what you’re describing fits in the “convenient” category rather that in the “world-changing” one? Or does that Reality Distortion Field come with its own definition of “world-changing”?
Also: are you aware that Apple had nothing to do with the technology and the protocols involved in your examples? Heck, it certainly didn’t build the infrastructure required for all of this “magic” to be even possible.
Last but not least: I really hope that your example of driving, video calling and sending pictures (apparently all at the same time) was just an unfortunate example, because if you do anything else whilst driving you are a big feckin’ eejit — as we say around here.
RT.
You forgot things like Fire, Agriculture and the the Code of Hammurabi
Only which version is best? Civ 2,3 or 4? 2 is good for a “quick” game, but 3 has the best AI balance. Let’s find a plot to colonize!
Ha, I have played Civilization games since the first one, and I still like the second one the best.
Get off my lawn you damn kids!
Many regions and several countries (eg Timor Leste) rely entirely on cellular networks. Mobile phones are absolutely essential for more than a billion people who have no other practical means of communication.
It is very strange to choose the number 2 phone manufacturer as worldwide market share and praise it based on number of units sold!
Samsung Galaxy phone have been sold more (as units) worlwide than iPhones!
The article is about the absolute number sold, not how those numbers compare to other manufacturers. Samsung should probably have been congratulated when they passed the billion unit sales mark too, but that’s nothing whatsoever to do with this article.
This article is a masturbation because there are other several phone brands which were sold in a number higher than iPhones! What is the point to celebrate the n-th (where n > 2) phone brand which sold over 1 billion?
Apple has many pluses but celebrating the absolute number of phones made by Apple makes no sense whatsoever when Apple’s goal is to make premium products/phones and very high profits. It is like Porsche is celebrating that it sold 1 million cards.
Also absolute numbers of iPhones is exactly the same absolute number of phones ever made by Apple.
For example, Nokia’s one billionth phone sold was an 1100 in Nigeria in 2005.
Edited 2016-07-28 14:22 UTC
What’s wrong with celebrating Porche selling 1 million cards? Or 1 million cars for that matter? Hell, I was dead chuffed when my first software release passed one thousand downloads. The fact that other software has millions or even billions of downloads is totally irrelevant – the one I was interested in passed one thousand so that’s what I put in my social media posts.
It sounds like you just have a problem with Apple for whatever reason.
Ok. Now you cannot prove your point unless you attack me personally with some lies!
1. I wrote specifically in my post that Apple has pluses.
2. I attacked Thom’s post and not Apple! These two things are different. I didn’t write anything bad about Apple! I wrote negative things about the Thom’s post. Your association between the my post and being negative about Apple is totally wrong.
Edited 2016-07-29 14:35 UTC
You many not be aware that Porsche is now a mass market brand selling around 225,000 vehicles a year. They reached the One Million sales many decades ago.
I sometimes wonder what the phones we commonly use today would look like if it had not been for Apple.
Would we have a swipe UI by now?
I am sure we would have apps and it would all be very internet centric all the same. But how would it look? Would we even have multi touch? Would we still fiddle with a stylus?
I hope you are being sarcastic.
Why? You may not like it, but I have to wonder the same thing too. Smartphones before the iPhone, even Android in its primitive stages, were designed around a keypad save for Windows Mobile which was designed around resistive touch and stylus. I wonder the same as the OP: would we have moved to finger and multi-touch based UIs? Apple had a way of packaging non-mainstream technologies into something flashy and easy to work with. Nokia and Microsoft laughed at the idea, which makes me think the world of the smartphone would look and feel very different today if they had been the ones at the forefront.
Makes you think what would happen if the persons in charge at Nokia and Microsoft at that time would have stayed in charge, never changed their minds and kept every other company from making a touch device for fingers.
Well, they didn’t stay in charge. And look what happened… I’m not arguing that no one else could have done it. I’m arguing that no one else did it for the mainstream before Apple. Ideas don’t mean jack if you don’t make them reality, and it therefore makes zero difference what the “smart people” at Nokia and Microsoft might have seen and done. And had they been successful and had Apple not come along, it follows that it would be unlikely that the management would have changed drastically. So, what would smartphones be like had Nokia and Microsoft led the charge? I don’t know. You don’t know. But my money is on more keypad and stylus interactions.
Apple came along at the right place and time, with the right management at the time, and were not afraid to take the chance on a new interaction model. It makes no difference what the engineers at Nokia/Microsoft/RIM were capable of doing. It only matters what they did. And what they did was stick to the status quo.
There is the argument that is it a GOOD thing that we’re now using rectangular slabs of glass pushed up against our ears? Personally I prefer using a stylus at times (it certainly has it’s uses occasionally) and I loved having a hardware keyboard. The ultimate phone to me is still the N900, if Nokia had kept updating Maemo/MeeGo and maybe had an advanced/simple setting like Samsung does with Touchwiz, we’d potentially be in a different place today. Instead they let in the Microsoft Trojan horse that cost both companies billions.
Does this include only phones sold in Apple Stores? If it does, they have breached that limit much earlier.
Many 3’rd parties sell iPhones in countries were Apple has no intention to ever open a store.
Edited 2016-07-28 09:22 UTC
the device didn’t cause a revolution in computing
See? I’ve just said that.
And I’m not being ironic, far from it. Apple beautifully copied and perfected what other people had created before but to say they caused a revolution? No way.
That was about my thought too. The iPhone may have been more popular than the competition, but they didn’t revolutionize anything. Touch screens, smart phones, mobile gaming, phones playing music and video calls were all popular before the iPhone came along. The iPhone was barely an evolutionary step at the time and it definitely wasn’t any way revolutionary.
The product has been successful, but you have to fanboy pretty hard to believe the iPhone was revolutionary on any level.
Agreed here too. Palm, for one, had a smart phone before Apple who just copied alot of Palm’s UI. Apple may have done it better but it was no revolution.
The only thing I don’t like about what the iPhone did was the destruction of the physical keyboard. Some days it feels like I spend hours backspacing, *correcting, and sending strange messages. I use swype, and several other variations, but nothing beats a real keyboard for me. I can type very fact with 2 thumbs and the mistakes are far less. But the industry has given up on that option. Sigh.
While I`m not Apple hater, I can say that the device didn’t cause a revolution in computing. That`s just a smartphone. Nokia had them earlier. It may be the best smartphone ever, but it`s still just an smartphone.
And most tasks from those smarts could be done in featerphones also. Years before iPhone I already could browse WWW, checking my e-mails, playing games, writing notes, using apps (even ssh to my Debian box!).
Endomondo is cool, but… Come on… revolution? :X
Just a smartphone integrated with a unique ecosystem (Apple’s). For many users, that is an important benefit of the iPhone experience….ymmv.
I know of at least 2, and my family isn’t even iPhone users.
This is the problem I have with the figures these companies tout, be it Apple, Google, or MSFT, because they ignore all the devices no longer in use because they can’t be updated or run like ass on the new version or get busted or whatever. Hell at one time I had 6 fricking Android devices gathering dust in sock drawers yet I have zero doubt Google touted all of them like they were in use in some presentation somewhere.
So every time I see a number like this I take it with a HUGE grain of salt, because I know all the ways this can be manipulated…is this sales to people or does it count sales to stores? How many of these devices are actually in service? Without knowing these kinds of things this number really doesn’t tell us much about the current state of the ecosystem…well other than Apple has a lot of money, but we knew that before, right?