Slashdot Mirror
The Most Popular Product Of All Time
Apple announced Wednesday that it has sold more than one billion iPhones. To understand the magnitude of the milestone, Asymco's Horace Dediu has compiled a list of the best-selling products across several categories. From his post (link shared via email by reader JoshTops):Car model: VW Beetle 21.5 million; car brand: Toyota Corolla 43 million; music album: Thriller 70 million; vehicle: Honda Super Cub 87 million; book title: Lord of the Rings 150 million; toy: Rubik's Cube 350 million; game console: Playstation 382 million; book series: Harry Potter Series 450 million; mobile phone: iPhone 1 billion.
The iPhone is not only the best-selling mobile phone but also the best selling music player, the best-selling camera, the best-selling video screen and the best-selling computer of all time. It is, quite simply, the best-selling product of all time. It is that because it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us. And it did all that in less than nine years. Update: 07/28 20:07 GMT by M :Dediu just told me that the list doesn't include consumable non-durable products.
The iPhone is not only the best-selling mobile phone but also the best selling music player, the best-selling camera, the best-selling video screen and the best-selling computer of all time. It is, quite simply, the best-selling product of all time. It is that because it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us. And it did all that in less than nine years. Update: 07/28 20:07 GMT by M :Dediu just told me that the list doesn't include consumable non-durable products.
There are plenty of others.. Like sliced bread, for example.
The Big Mac is the most popular product of all time.
Would be a knife. Everyone alive and dead has (had) at least one since longer than we've been human.
I'm pretty certain the number of milk cartons (and previously, bottles) sold would blow the iPhone out of the water.
Someone appears to be desperate for good news...
Look, I like my iPhone, but - I'm sure there are a myriad of products which have sold more than a billion units. Q-Tips and Reynolds Wrap are probably among that august group.
#DeleteChrome
Recent estimates put the Bible at 5 billion copies sold.
How many Miller Lights have been sold?
It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive...
...except with an oscilloscope.
But seriously, hyperbolize much?
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Sorry, Apple fanbois, the iPhone is not the best selling camera of all time.
It may be the best selling "device with a camera" of all time, but it is not a "camera".
Furthermore: bic pens? razors? pine tree-shaped air-fresheners ... I would wager a bet these all sold more.
It has sold very well, yes, but let's not blow our load over it.
Finally a suitable metric for culling the human population.
Just post something so obviously wrong about a tech product and the nerds will come rolling in with tons of ad impressions.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Milk, bread, cheese, rice, Big Mac?
"...it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us. And it did all that in less than nine years."
Get a room.
Guinness estimates that 5 billion copies of the Bible have been sold.
G.E. Lightbulbs: 100's of Billions.
There's probably been more apples (as in the fruit) sold than all Apple products!
it's kind of disingenuous to compare it to some of the products. For example the books, they don't change yet the phone has changed quite a bit over time. Who will keep their phone for nine years yet the books will be kept in many cases for decades and who needs to get a new LoTR? The same goes for autos, they can easily be working for fifteen years and people have a much greater investment in them. I also doubt that you could get parts and repair for an iphone fifteen years later too. They're all very different products.
Also, the iphone isn't that radical, it would have happened a year or two later from another company.
Pageviews vs Unique Visitors Isn't that number is skewed because of how many unique people bought multiple iPhones due to wear/tear and/or planned obsolescence. I know I didn't have to buy 5-8 copies of The Lord of the Rings to utilize it for it's lifetime. - Mmm.... McDonald's Hamburgers.
I wipe my ass with products more "popular" than the iPhone.
Your messiah is long dead, don't you think it's time to pick another religion?
Although they were not an official sponsor of the Olympic Games, Durex provided 150,000 free condoms to more than 10,000 athletes that competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London
That's in one month, in one place. They have several subbrands name, but I'm sure that they have some of them which are over 1 billion.
I would like a new feature in the form of a story filter based on poster.
I won't argue that the iPhone is a successful product - clearly it is. The uncritical leap from reasonable statements about its success as a product to the "so much more" and "enabler of change" bugs me a bit. The blatant worship makes me question the entire article and leads me to believe that the reality is somewhat less profound. And that's too bad, because it takes away from the deserved praise that the iPhone and Apple should receive for their success. I've heard of "damning with faint praise". Now I've actually seen "damning with overenthusiastic praise" in action. As always, the middle path is the place to walk.
The iPhone is not only the best-selling mobile phone but also the best selling music player, the best-selling camera, the best-selling video screen and the best-selling computer of all time.
There is no "the iPhone". iPhone is a model designation that has covered a family of phones. It's just as idiotic as saying the Toyota Corolla is the best selling car because each year the product is tangibly different than the year before. The Toyota Corolla sold today bears little resemblance to the one sold even 10 years ago much less 30. If they want to specify a particular build of those products then fine. But calling the iPhone brand a single product is just stupid.
Dumb Articles Like This Make Apple Look Bad
Article: "It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control."
Dude -- chill the F out. It's a phone that uses internet.
It's not 2007 when the iPhone was launched, there is no need to pee your pants.
It would probably be ok to pee your pants during the 2007 iPhone unveiling. A decade later, no excuse to pee your pants over an iPhone.
The bulk of the iPhones are made by different vendors such as Samsung, LG, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments.
If you are counting all the different iPhones over the years, then you need to count all the android devices; Google claims there 1.4 billion _active_ android devices.
And it's surely also the one that sold most units of the same SKU, unlike all iPhone variants mashed up in one big statistic. It is in every single market in the world, for every single pocket type, rich or poor, black, white, red or yellow (sorry if that sounded racial). Of course it might no longer be the most profitable, but wake me up when there's relevant numbers of daily purchases of the exact same phone by the same subject for his or her own personal use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones
What an idiot...
Asymco (the website that published this 'story')? Never heard of them. What makes them the authority on sales numbes?
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
If the iPhone is one product, how many Galaxy S have Samsung sold since the first one? The iPhone have its variants, Samsung has much more variants but still counts as 1 product, right?
This is as big fanboy clickbait article as it can be.
...according to Random Internet Guy With Totally Unimpeachable Methods: http://overhowmanybillionserved.blogspot.com/
more advertising.
And I can't wait for the Trumpers to jump on the fact none were built in Merica!
I often wonder if the people who post stuff like this are the same people who complain about H-1Bs. I suspect so.
If someone is unemployed, and would like products consumed in America to be built in America, so that he might have a better chance to get a job, well, I disagree but I have to respect where he's coming from. Mocking people like that is why we have Trump.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
...sales NUMBERS..
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
One Mr. Kalashnikov would like to remind you that he has (often literally) revolutionized substantially more territory than Apple has; and he only had to sell ~100 million units to do it!
Apple iPoop! Available with pastel colors!
Over 17 billion TP tubes are used each year. That's enough to fill the Empire State Building, twice.
The iPhone is not a product, it's a brand. As in there are multiple different models.
When they compare it to cars, they compared it to specific models - the VW Beetle, the Lord of the Rings. They didn't compare it to all VW cars, or all Tolkien books.
That would have been a fair comparison.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I dread to think what Horace Dediu was doing to himself as he wrote this, but I don't think it was sanitary.
It is, quite simply, the best-selling product of all time. It is that because
Because you've decided what counts as a "product" and what doesn't. How many cigarettes have ever been bought? How many copies of the Bible have sold? How many different versions of the iPhone are you bundling as a single product?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What about loaves of bread? How many loaves of bread have been sold?
I'd call bread a product, certainly sold more than 1 billion loaves over the years. In fact, I'd bet quite a large sum of money far more than 1 billion loaves of bread have been made over the years and sold.
This seems like a desperate attempt to take a big number and wack off to it while claiming Apple is the greatest ever.
or what about computers for that matter?
AC comments get piped to
Yes, bitches!
Planned obsolescence works !
Yup, indeed. It's not a product, it's fashion. And like with all designer clothes, you need to perpetually throw the old ones away and buy new ones !
- Call me when a car maker start to require you to replace your car every 24months (replacing the whole car, I mean. Literally. Not over billing you for a simple software update over some proprietary extension to the ODB port that they charge metaphorically as expensive as a new car). ...well actually, on second thoughts, it seems to me that the whole industry is whatching carefully Apple, taking notes, and trying to apply planned obsolescence to their own field of work..
- Call me when you need to replace a music record record every few month... no... wait... Okay, the whole purpose of adding DRM to music and introducing a new format every once in a while is exactly for that. So I'll concede the point.
- Call me when you need to replace a book every few months... oh... yeah... right. The whole DRM on e-books and Amazon remotely wiping books. Ok, I'll concede that one too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Supposedly, 6 billion bibles have been sold or donated. The iPhone still has a way to go.
The most popular product of all time would have to be carbon dioxide. Without it the vast majority of plants that sustain animal life could not survive.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Surely rice (counted by the grain) is the most popular product of all time!
Since their charge cables are so shitty, each iPhone user will go through at least 10 cables per phone, so 1billion iPhones = 10billion+ chargers
Those are consumables.
Given how quickly smartphone obsolesce and how all manufacturer try to require you to buy a new one every 24 months max...
Well that isn't entirely inappropriate to compare smartphones and consumables.
If you only look at durable goods, and you multiply the number manufactured by the useful lifetime,
Wait, what ?
"durable goods" ? "useful lifetime" ? What the hell do these subjects have anything to do with a smartphone ?
Next, you're going to speak about battery longevity. Actual battery. The kind that holds for a couple of weeks instead of a couple of days/hours...
then I nominate the AK-47. Over 100 million have been manufactured, and many are still in use after more than 60 years.
Which would be very hard to say about smartphone.
(But probably still applies to the ancient Nokia plain-stupid-phone that you've forgotten that you still had at the bottom of some drawer. With its battery still at 50%)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ok, so how about this:
Bread: >100 Trillion pieces for sure (over 8000 years of history of humans making bread) ...
Milk: > 100 Trillion glasses for sure (over 8000 years of history of humans using non human milk)
Shoes. I don't know, almost everybody has feet, almost everybody wears maybe 100 pairs of shoes in their lifetime.....
I mean iPhone is the *best selling product ever* is not even close.
You can't handle the truth.
You can't just arbitrarily take the sum of all the models that a company has produced in a category and compare it to specific models in other fields. Try comparing the iPhone to 3M's all types of post-it notes, who has sold more units? If you want Apple to win that comparison by going "by value" you are worse off, since most car manufacturers trump you, even if you just go by "model" as this BS topic does and not the total of cars that a manufacturer has made. Oh, and, by the way, and "Corolla" is just a model line when we say "brand" we usually refer to "Toyota".
If you want to get more serious, you can find products that sell more both in units and value. E.g. Coca Cola sells in a week, about as many bottles of Coke as Apple iPhones have been sold in history and it is just a matter of how many years back you have to go with Coke bottles to reach a greater overall value in Coke than iPhones...
And it gets even worse than that. Even among phones, the iPhone is not that remarkable in *numbers*. The lowly Nokia 1110 sold 250 million units. This is far above any single iPhone model. In fact, some of its directy predecessors each sold more units than all or most iPhone models (e.g. the 1100 also about 250 million, the 3210 over 150 million, the 3310 130 million etc). Similar to the iPhones Nokia made phones that were very similar in looks and software and differed only in the model number, so if you can sum up all iPhones you can sum up a line of Nokia phones and come up with more than a billion.
Why not just stay at the fact that the introduction of the iPhone was a paradigm shift that shaped the entire smartphone market and it continues to be one of the most popular platforms to this day? Why do you have to make up such BS headlines?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Q-Tips and Reynolds Wrap are probably among that august group.
Things that you only use for a limited amount of time, before throwing them away and buying a new(er) one ?
No, no. I assure you, smartphones also qualify in this category...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Wheel
Faucets
Toilets
Doors
Windows
Sheets
Underwear
Shoes
Cups
Bowls
Knives
Forks
Spoons
Cars
Horses
Cats
Dogs
screws
nails
Hammers
Bread
This list is fucking endless. Just like the Apple spin.
Yes, if you can lump ALLLLL the iphone models into your apple hype machine, I can lump all of these types of products together too.
Books don't break nearly as often, and VW beetles could be repaired.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Coincidentally the first instance of copyright infringement known to man.
Read the comments to that article
The bible got the iPhone covered a couple of times over. And it's not something cheesy consumable like the big mac (see what I did there?).
How many of those are still functional? Because everyone I know with an iPhone has gone through at least three.
If you stop supporting you're products after a while. When they come out with a new phone the old ones start to develop slow downs and other crap.
A friend liked to go to integrated circuit design events so he could point out that he developed one of the most common chips of all time.
It was the AM/FM radio chip used in billions of devices. Does anyone know how many SATA connectors Foxconn has made?
Congratulations to Apple for selling as many phones in 9 years cumulative as Android does every year!
The iPhone is distributed by large corporations to employees. One example is Salesforce.com, there are many others. These are behind the scenes bootybust contracts given because the homosexuals at Apple smile with twinkles in their eyes at faggots hired at other corporations.
Nobody except the tech illiterate think the walled garden iPhone or walled garden Mac's are worth a fuck.
Android is Linux and the phones are faster and they actually tell you the specs without having to x-ray them. There is also much more competition between devices, and you can even install custom ROM's. (Firmware, they are not actually ROM chips).
The only problem with Android now is Google spying for the US government. But there is no fucking way you can pump Apple products with a straight face. That company is homosexual with homosexual mindset products. They absolutely can not even think straight.
Mac OS X is similarly gay. Where FreeBSD would be like a solid roof on your home, impenetrable and sharp looking.. Mac OS X is like having your roof pink with Free Tibet and Green Day bumper stickers all over it... and made in China.. and undisclosed materials.. and to read the fucking installation papers you have to speak to a representative.
Apple: Get mother fucking butt fucked. Again.
Actually, Concrete surpasses the iPhone my many orders of magnitude as the most popular product of all time.
Proof that Steve Jobs was really Christ in disguise.
There was at least one other Slashdot post about the billion iPhone sales.
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/16/07/27/2040256/one-billion-iphones-have-been-sold-apple-says
The only difference was that it didn't include all of that crap about it being the best-selling product of all time. Coca Cola, for example, sells billions of Coke servings in much less time. Also, if you were to lump all of the Android devices, like they lump all of the iPhone devices, you would find that more than a paltry billion were sold.
WAY over 5 billion by now...
Although it is impossible to obtain exact figures, there is little doubt that the Bible is the worlds best-selling and most widely distributed book. A survey by the Bible Society concluded that around 2.5 billion copies were printed between 1815 and 1975, but more recent estimates put the number at more than 5 billion.
So do Bible thumpers - and they've got a lot in common with Apple fanbois.
2. They both act smugly superior;
3. They both show the same behaviors as any other cult;
4. They both have over a billion sold;
5. They both end up costing a lot more to their average user than competing products (atheisim and android);
6. They both eagerly await the next revelation.
7. There's bugs in both - and the updates to "fix" them;
8. They both claim better security; 9. They both claim to be a better value over the long term;
10. They both have a messiah who rose from the dead.
And for the bonus - eventually many outgrow their narrow view. :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I seem to recall that it's been purchased more than a few billion times, but then again what is the word of God compared to Steve Job's gadget.
I wonder how many iphones have been sold vs those basic casio watches that are fucking everywhere!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
It has tone used. Manufacturing and dumping doesn't count.
Actually the best selling book of all time is the Bible, it has sold far more than a billion copies. So it easily overtakes the iPhone.
Actually there have probably been more than a billion toothpicks sold as well, so I'm not sure what the comparison is here.
Next question?
...that fart snifter?
This article -- while an interesting opinion piece -- is clearly missing some key pieces in the argument it tries to make, which is largely why so many people are attempting to offer their own contrasting figures both here on /. and on the original article thread. So here's one more example, to add to the collection: The Bible is the best selling book in the world, at somewhere over 5 billion copies... but that's a sales figure which spans back over two centuries. So where's the time factor, in this analysis of Apple's iPhone sales? Clearly, the author needed to run this piece past a few friends at the very minimum, before running with it. (Actually, I think professional editorial staffers are what's missing from most articles, these days -- but perhaps that's a soapbox for another time.)
Full disclosure: I own multiple iPhones, multiple Macs... and multiple Bibles.
The first product sold from "the oldest profession" I am guessing is the product that has been sold the most times in history. It comes in many colors and you can buy it lease it or establish use based licensing but it is still the same product. Come to think of it this is slashdot so I can see how others here might not have experience with this product and might not agree.
TL;DR: It's a combination of the state of degradation of a (non durable) smartphone forcing you to upgrade, and the manufacturer's marketing department spending as much resources as possible and doing any trick they can think of to persuade you that upgrading is the best idea ever.
The phone itself forces you. ...etc...
Once the screen is broken and un-readable.
Or the phone is bent beyond it's breaking point...
Phone are very common use objects. They are submitted to tons of abuse simply because of usage pattern.
Smartphone which pack even more functionnality (internet acces, mail/chat, etc.) are even more used and thus abused.
But smartphone maker tend to chose different set of equilibrium points and compromises.
Aesthetic value (the new one is 0.4mm thinner than the previous one and 0.2mm thinner than the competition !) over durability (plastic is considered unfashionnable although depending on the composition it can better withstand some mecanical stress).
Eye candy (more CPU core, bigger GPU) over battery life, etc.
Thus smartphone tend to degrade very quickly.
And once you go to the Apple shop to ask for (over expensive) repairs, clerks are trained to point at how tiny is the difference in price with the then newer model.
Yes, nobody forces you to change smartphones and you could still use an outdated iPhone 1 if you would.
(though the question remains if there are enough OTA update to the radio firmware to remain compatible with the network).
But *very few* people actually, and most of them basically do because they don't have much choice.
Most of the other people will have abused their phone beyond repair (or more precisely to the point where the extremely overcharged repair price doesn't look that cheap compared to upgrading to a new model).
The remaining poeple will have succumbed to the sirens of marketing department and bought a new one because its sounds so much cooler(*) that the previous one. And we all know how much Apple's marketing department is better than everyone else's..
(*: though you have to concede that, as of lately, we seem to have reached the "peak smartphone" and sells are getting a little bit lower, as smartphone have become good enough, and marketers have problems finding new reasons for people to replace their old non-broken phones).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Transistor: the best selling discrete electronic component: billions of billions of units
Android: the best "selling" operating system: whatever is more than iPhones.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The Big Mac disagrees....
McDonald's estimates 550 million Big Macs are sold each year in the U.S. alone.
Since the "iPhone" as an entire product line has been in existence the Big Mac as a single product has outsold it 5:1
Somehow not...
Bread?
Beer?
Wine?
Wheels?
Bananas?
Oranges?
Water?
Cigarettes?
Bullets?
Swords?
Lumber?
Paper?
Bibles?
Corn?
Potatoes?
Pretty much anything that existed before this guy was alive?
quite clearly the author doesn't have a clue
Damn, Harry Potter outsold Lord of the Rings 3:1?
No wonder we are fucked.
since Windows 1? that is an equivalent metric to how many of all versions of the iPhone.
and I would bet a lot more than 1 billion Windows licenses have been sold.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
" It is, quite simply, the best-selling product of all time. It is that because it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us."
"Red,I do believe you are talking out of your ass."
The most popular product was, and continues to be... well, I can't really say here except to say it is intimately linked to the world's oldest profession.
Car model: VW Beetle
Car brand: Toyota Corolla
WTF? In both cases, there is a model (Beetle, Corolla) and brand (VW, Toyota).
And everyone always forgets about trucks. Ford had sold 28 million F150s as of eleven years ago.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
They sell a couple million per year. Probably well over 40 million by now, maybe close to 50.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What about those who don't even own one?(and never will) Are we "changed" too? And it's stupid to combine all the iPhones versions into one statistic. If we do that, I'm pretty sure every journal sold more than 1 billions editions of their papers over time.
*twirls finger and whistles*
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
How many Match books ? How many pairs of Levi's have been sold ? How many bottles of coke ? How many Big Mac's ?
This is an fluff piece that should be treated like the disguised ad that it is.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
/. has really become worthless lately. Could we get rid of these incompetent idiots like Manishs, please? Maybe then /. can be a good site again.
The world produced 76,378,700 tonnes of apples last year. There's certainly more than 2000 apples/tonne, therefore you're looking at much more than 150 billion apples in one year. Sure, not all of those produced were sold, but even if 1/10 are, they still handily beat any and all smartphones.
Umm the Bic both lighter and pen crushes those numbers.
Call me a Luddite, and I respond that I've been using computers for hours every day since 1979.
I know hardware, I know code.
I will never own a smartphone.
Why, you ask? (or most probably don't)
I made an observation a few years ago that up until the early 90s, I would use computers to get away from people for a few hours. Now when I want to get away from people, I stop using them for a few hours.
The social media hivemind empowered by the smartphone is not for everybody.
Every evening I sit on my porch with my 16-year-old cat and watch people out walking their dogs or taking an evening stroll. It's astonishing how many people do so with their nose attached to a smartphone. Furthermore, it's really really sad to see.
Smartphones have made it too easy to be super-stimulated. I know enough about computers and enough about addiction to know when to abstain from certain behavior.
I know their utility, and having that much computing power in your pocket is certainly a dream I've held since I was very young, but how it's been promoted and indoctrinated and utilized by society at large is quite disconcerting from a certain point-of-view.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and smartphones... it's like the worst version of advanced inter-connectivity from classic science-fiction has come to pass. /rant off
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Always hilarious watching butthurt fandroids justify their shitty platform.
Those are consumables. If you only look at durable goods, and you multiply the number manufactured by the useful lifetime, then I nominate the AK-47.
You are forgetting the oft used quote about the pen being mightier than the sword. This is not really talking about the pen itself - although if this statistic is accurate a Bic Crystal ball point pen would only need to have a useful lifetime of 22 days to beat the AK47 if we assume an average lifetime of 60 years and even without taking into account subsequent sales since 2005.
However the quote it really referring to what the pen writes: books. If we take the best selling example, the Bible, then not only has this book alone sold ~5 billion copies (+/-1 billion depending on whom you believe) the oldest of which is almost 1,700 years old. Other religious texts such as the Qu'ran similarly have wide circulations and are older. So even with your criterion for age times circulation these will have the AK47 completely beaten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just adding 4-5 Models of the Nokia dumbphones is enough to beat the numbers.
Wow this article reads like it was written by the #1 Mac Zealot of all time. The only thing the iphone was "best" at , was its marketing strategy, i.e making morons believe their product was significantly better than the competition (hint : it wasnt), and that it was some sort of status symbol (hint: its not).
Would it be trash bags? Not even close. Sheets of toilet paper? No, too anthropocentric. Ant eggs? No, too terrestrial-centric. Neutrons? No, but getting warmer....
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Frisbees: maybe about 100 million a year counting all brands, for > 30 years.
The Gideons, a missionary organization, have given away over 2 BILLION Bibles over the past century.
What are the sales of all mobile phones ever sold combined for Sony/Samsung/LG/whathaveyou?
While mindless nitpickers fuss over numbers and statistics, the important message is overlooked. Here it is again in case you never got past the stupid headline:
"It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us. And it did all that in less than nine years."
There are few developments that compare. Ford's affordable automobile. Fire. Wheel. The personal computer and the internet. Gene sequencing and Crispr...
In my life, I felt that the Norelco (Phillips) CarryCorder was a major breakthrough (it allowed me to 'pirate' music from the radio). The ancient Norelco shaver still hasn't been improved upon, which is disappointing. The1969 Honda 750 motorcycle blew me away, although they had made many exotic machines before this was a breakthrough in speed, reliability and beauty for ordinary consumers.
You and I have different criteria for major game changing developments, but don't deny the impact of the first user friendly smartphone.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Anyone know how many rolls of toilet paper Charmin has sold? I know many people who have purchased every model of iPhone, but none who have used fewer rolls of TP since they were both on the market. Makes me think that there's at least one product that is more popular...
Rubik's Cube? I think not.
Lego sell over 200 million lego *sets* a year, lego has been very popular for a long time, and is not really consumable.
But, of course this is complete bs, usual Apple marketing stuff. If they would stick to product development it would be a good idea.
I would expect that more washing machines have been sold since their invention
I'm sure those are in rather high digits. News papers. Nails, staples.
On ave how many iphone does each person buy? This says more of how well Apple does in getting people to keep buying new phones for minor upgrade every year. Wonder why people are in poverty? this is one small reason. I have used 2 cheap phones in the last 10 years, I think that saved me over $1000 compared to people who upgrade yearly.
As quoted in the article...
"It is that because it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control. It changed the world because it changed us.
And it did all that in less than nine years. One has to wonder what it will enable in the next nine."
This is brand loyalty at it's best. Absolute pure and serious conditioned brainwashing...
The very nature of a computer is a device capable of storing, retrieving, copying, altering, and transmitting data. It's that simple and it's been around for a long time. Sure it has gotten smaller and smaller, but that's it.
The iphone is not a phone. It's a computer capable of cellular telephony.
It's very very sad to hear words like that, knowing what apple has done to the computer...
You are damn right it has enabled change... It has created computers that are virtually only useful within the apple ecosystem. It has unleashed the forces of massive manipulation and exploitation of the ignorance of it's users to maximize profits, and yes, there is very little control for the user of an iphone or ianything...
It changed the world into something that honors men like Steve Jobs who's only real contribution to humanity is products that are so sought after they are often stolen or traded like actual currency, all the while locking it's 'victim's into an ecosystem that caters only to itself...
The Apple ecosystem is a cult, pure and simple...
Some of the hardware is nice (those keyboards are pretty slick), but other than that... I prefer to have the freedom to use an actual COMPUTER... Rather than a jailed device that 'permits' me to do certain operations from time to time...
It's a god damn computer sold by masters of manipulation and exploitation that allows you to make calls and run software that runs you...
What's with the constant Apple wankathon that's been taking place on /. over the last 6 months?
Best selling computer my ass, that honour belongs to another one.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
1956 Sturgeon story about mobile/wearable computing's potential that inspired Ted Nelson and others leading to the web and so the iPhone: https://archive.org/stream/gal...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
Let's hope the upside is realized -- not a surveillance/control downside.
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
Still trying to help when I can -- just so little time:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Hope others can carry things forward in their won way -- and many are! :-)
Half-way through reading the "The Jennifer Project" new sci-fi novel by Larry Enright, which almost seems like a Skills of Xanadu remake in some ways. Nor sure how it ends. :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Jennife...
Hopefully not the same as "With Folded Hands". :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm still on my first (used) car. My stereo from 1993 still works fine. I've bought 3 "video screens" over a much longer period as well. Count most of those for my wife as well. Between us we've probably had a dozen iphones.... so iPhone=consumable
Really.
Casteism
I have to wonder how many of those phones "sold" were actually replacements after they bricked themselves and could not be fixed?
I actually wrote off the iPhone after I was told the SIM card was not changeable and you were locked into using it on the provider you purchased it for. This was from the guys at the Apple Store and not internet rumor. The proprietary, money bilking, you don't own your equipment, business model of Apple has rankled since the Apple IIe days. I'm sure the iPhone works nicely as long as you only do things that Apple has approved and don't experiment with your own phone.
Apple hit things spot on with the iPod classic. Nothing else Apple makes has appeared, to me, to be worth the higher price than you can get other tech for.
NRRPT/RCT