Half a million iPhones sold over the weekend
Steve Safran July 2nd, 2007
Analysts say Apple has sold about 500,000 iPhones since letting the device out of the gate Friday afternoon. That’s an opening weekend of $250 - $300 million in sales. About two percent of buyers have experienced delays in activating their service. Anectodal evidence suggests people are preferring to pony up the extra $100 for the iPhone with eight gigs of memory (double the four gig model that sells for $500).
10 Comments Add your own
1. Richard | July 2nd, 2007 at 9:21 am
Is that a big number? Half a million seems like a big number. But with all the hype and “that Apple magic” something like 5-million wouldn’t be surprising.
Playstation2 debut in 2001 - 500,000 First day sales
Halo2 game sold over 2 million first day out in 2004(5?)
Last week AT&T Marketing was predicting the IPhone would sell-out in 24-48 hours, but production was never quantified.
A quote from a Bloomberg report, “A lot of our stores have sold out,'’ said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for San Antonio-based AT&T, the largest U.S. wireless service. “We’re restoring our inventory as fast as we can.'’
Question, if you can restore inventory are you truly sold out?
How many of these doo-dads are sitting in the warehouse?
2. Scott | July 2nd, 2007 at 9:40 am
Steve-
I’d like to see information on whether the iPhone can be used for work by television/video pros. For instance, does it have USB or Firewire input? If so, can footage be captured and sent? Can footage be downloaded (if you’re editing in the field and need a brief interview clip, for instance). Is third-party software available to log footage (maybe with a screen cap for identification)?
I’ve heard stories that it’s not ‘enterprise-friendly’ to most of the business world. Just curious to know if it can be a tool for those of us in the industry who don’t just want to watch YouTube clips.
3. tdc | July 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 am
i heard it gives an awesome shave. and dispenses mustard and ketchup too. (i’m in search of the v-blog entry a guy in pittsburgh tv did on this very subject, any help?)
why all the f’in naysayers?
4. tdc | July 2nd, 2007 at 10:02 am
btw- even though snl is in reruns apple had iphone spots run in the first 2 breaks.
5. Safran | July 2nd, 2007 at 10:04 am
Success? Let’s do some lazy math…
AT&T has 46 million subs. Let’s round that up to 50 million (because we’re lazy). In two days, they sold 500,000 iPhones. That’s, rather neatly, one percent of its subscribers. Now, a certain percentage of that number will be people who had other plans who jumped to AT&T. We’ll wait on that number.
Suppose a movie came out and one percent of the country saw it opening weekend:
300 million people
one percent is 300,000
x $9/ticket
= $27 million opening weekend
Most people would consider that (depending on the film’s budget) a modest success.
The iPhone “grossed” about $275 million in sales, so its “box office” was ten times that. Plus, AT&T’s take isn’t a one-time-only thing - remember that it gets monthly revenue for the life of the phone.
You can make the number seem small, too. There are about 250 million cell phones in the U.S. 525,000 iPhones means that only one out of every 500 of our phones is an iPhone. (Today…)
I realize I’m comparing Apples (!) to oranges to grapes and bananas here. But why not?
I don’t care for what analysts or companies spin as “success” “failure” or otherwise. Look at the numbers. They seem successful to me.
(Disclosure: I own shares of Apple.)
6. Jay | July 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 am
Yeah, but what are they selling for on ebay?
7. JoeMo | July 2nd, 2007 at 11:45 am
The current manufacturer pricing on the iPhone is roughly $220 US so : $220 X 500,000 units = $10,000,000ish, not bad for one weekend I guess.
8. rex | July 2nd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
More context: the RAZR has sold 50 million units so far. So the iPhone has 1% of what RAZR has right now. Optimistically, they’ll have 50% of what RAZR has in a year. Just saying…
[I also own an iPhone and love it.]
9. Ed | July 2nd, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Well, they blew away Newton Messagepad sales. They sold around 50K messagepads in 5 months.
10. Spinner | July 3rd, 2007 at 5:50 am
50 million RAZRs over 3.5 years = roughly 40,000/day
500,000 iPhones over 2 days = a little more than 40,000/day.
This can be spun many ways.
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