First Weekend iPhone Sales Top Nine Million, Sets New Record | Hacker News Reader

First Weekend iPhone Sales Top Nine Million, Sets New Record

apple.com

43 pointsphwd23 comments

Fun fact: If you stacked this many iPhones screen to back on top of each other the stack would be at least 82 times the height of the worlds tallest building[1] (assuming they were all the thinner 5S - Apple didn't say how many of this 9 million was the 5S versus the 5C).

[1] Burj Khalifa at 830m

that fact was not very fun

It'd be interesting to see a by-country breakdown of sales, given that they added 2 new markets to this release, China and Puerto Rico, having 1.35b and 3.6m populations, respectively. This first weekend could have been great....or it could have been subpar in comparison to the last release, depending on markets.

I think we can exclude PR.

The iPhone 5 sold about two million units on its opening weekend in China, so adding that to its original opening weekend (which didn't include China) and you get about seven million "opening weekend" sales including China's.

So that's seven versus nine million, still a substantial increase.

7 million iPhone 5 devices, vs 9 million iPhone 5s + 5c?

So we still need an estimate of iPhone 4S sales the weekend after the price drop (including in China) to compare fully.

Which record did they break? What was the previous record?

While I have no doubt that this was overall a record-breaking weekend for Apple, they are likely hoping that this gets interpreted as iPhone 5S sells better than the iPhone 5 did at its opening weekend. I think this is highly unlikely, though, because the 9 million includes both iPhone 5s and iPhone 5C, whereas previous year's record breaking sales number of 5 million included only the iPhone 5.

So how many iPhones 5S did Apple sell compared to iPhone 5 last year? Let's say the 5S and the 5C sold equally well (which is VERY doubtful considering not just price but also availability). This would put both iPhone 5S and 5C at 4.5 million. Both below iPhone 5 sales of 5 million. It is much more likely, however, that the 5C sold many more units than the 5S thus putting the 5S as lower than 4 million units sold, perhaps as low as 2.25 million.

There is no bad news here for Apple as I'm sure their profit margins on the 5C are similar, if not higher than the 5S. But it does indicate the oncoming commodification of smartphones and other personal digital devices. The 5C is definitely holding its own, and Apple's brand is as strong as ever but I just wonder if Apple really wants to get into this kind of competition.

I would say that there is too much speculation in your comment . You go from 4.5 million devices all the way to 2.25 just because you think 5C's are selling better?

Well yes speculating is for humans too. I wasn't entirely speculating though. I had read a headline saying that 5c is 3 times as popular as 5s. So trying to be as just in my speculating as I could, I went for a best-case worst-case range.

But in this instance it reminds me that to err is human as well. Because while trying to find the headline I was thinking of, I realized I'd mixed up my C's and my S's. It's the iPhone 5s that could be 3 times as popular as the 5c (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57604127-37/iphone-5s-acti...).

So here is my new speculation! iPhone 5c sells 2.25 million while iPhone 5s sells 6.75 million units. Indeed that's a little better than last year's 5 million, but my speculative gut is still telling me the 5c to 5s ratio is not quite that high.

The problem is that you can't back out the 5C sales and say you have the 5S number even if you did know it.

They are priced very similarly.. the 5C is probably cannibalizing a significant portion of would-be sales of the 5S.

In other words, Apple sold more iPhones over the WE than Nokia or Blackberry shipped smartphones during the last quarter...

http://allthingsd.com/20130718/nokia-sold-more-windows-phone...

Apple's marketing is insufferable. The apple designed A6 chip? What a complete load. What did they design exactly, the apple logo they paste on it? And they talk about going 64bit on a device that has only 1GB of memory as though that is a benefit to anyone. It will slow down every single app out there currently. The benefit of going 64bit is that it gets people to start writing apps that support the technology. For the future. When 64bit phones will actually make any sense, so it's a good move but they talk about it like it's a benefit to consumers now.

What is the markup on these things? Who is buying a phone that costs more than 3 times as much as its competitors and the screen size still hasn't exceeded 4 inches? The "retina" display on these isn't even 720p.

I'm obviously disturbed. Don't even get me started on the 5c.

Insufferable marketing aside, people seem to think that Apple can back it up with one of the best quality smartphones on the market.

> The apple designed A6 chip?

AFAIK, these claims are actually legitimate since Apple's acquisition of P. A. Semi a few years ago.

> And they talk about going 64bit on a device that has only 1GB of memory as though that is a benefit to anyone.

Double-precision floating point instructions will be much faster.

> Who is buying a phone that costs more than 3 times as much as its competitors and the screen size still hasn't exceeded 4 inches?

There are plenty of people who prefer the smaller size - I am one of them. My daily carry is an HTC One, and I love it (I think it's the best smartphone available). But...the screen is too big. The "back" button is also on the far bottom-left corner and I normally use the phone with one hand. Stretching to reach that button 5000x a day makes my hand hurt. My hand actually hurts. Also, I now have a hole in the front pocket of two pairs of jeans.

Which phone is 1/3rd the price and comes even close in the camera quality? I think the iPhone 5S competes on the high-end smartphone market - HTC One, Galaxy S4, Nokia 1020. The price is competitive.

> The "retina" display on these isn't even 720p.

So you'd prefer more pixels which your eye can't see because...

According to wikipedia the processors that PA Semi make are not used in any of Apple's current devices. Which would be part of the reason I'd never heard of that. The A6 chip is designed and manufactured by Samsung. Apple may have had a hand in encouraging them to go 64bit on something that uses a GB of memory, because why else would Samsung do that. But that doesn't exactly count.

It is not much faster because the amount of memory is not enough to make the technology really useful. The technology uses more memory than 32bit. Many tests have been conducted on this kind of thing 64bit isn't new. It has been shown that using less than 4GB of memory with a 64bit processor can often result in slower speeds.

Let alone like I mentioned that all the 32bit apps now have to run on top of another layer in the OS. And, apps that take advantage of 64bit will either not run on any other device, or they will have separate versions for 64bit and 32bit. Or they will simply be 32bit.

Which will I would imagine be the case for at least a little while.

I was referring to the Nexus 4 in my price comparison. A phone which is in the process of being replaced with a new version very soon. It's a good phone.

More pixels my eye can't see at what distance? It's a handheld device I'll hold it at whatever distance I want to. 720p is a reasonable resolution to expect. This isn't 2010 anymore.

Are my criticisms really that unreasonable?

> According to wikipedia the processors that PA Semi make are not used in any of Apple's current devices.

This is misleading. PA Semi used to make Power chips. Apple uses only ARM and x86 now, so of course anything from PA Semi isn't in any apple products. But, we won't hear any announcements about PA semi's work anymore since PA Semi has stopped its Power business and its 150 employees were subsumed into Apple. Apple claims to have designed the custom ARM chips in their iDevices. You think they are lying about that? They certainly have the engineering power to do it...

> I was referring to the Nexus 4 in my price comparison. A phone which is in the process of being replaced with a new version very soon. It's a good phone.

Yes, the Nexus 4 is a good phone. It's not a "great" phone. The camera quality is terrible; when you put it face down on a table the ringer is mostly inaudible; the battery life leaves much to be desired; speaker quality is bad; no LTE; etc. It doesn't compete with the high end smartphones, and it's priced accordingly.

> Are my criticisms really that unreasonable?

I believe your criticisms are based upon inaccurate assumptions. Please check your facts.

I now resign myself from speaking to Apple people anymore I am just way too busy for this crap. Check my facts check this.

What a cop out answer.

You seriously just said you won't converse with Apple users because they'll actually check your facts for truth.

> I now resign myself from speaking to Apple people

I'm actually an ex-googler and have been using Android as my daily carry for over a year. Not sure what this discussion has anything to do with possibly being a member of some nebulous "Apple people" group.

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