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.

Comments

BS "most popualar"

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of others.. Like sliced bread, for example.

Re:BS "most popualar"

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, this is just an exercise in mental fapping.

Even then its still not the best selling product. Each model is a DIFFERENT PRODUCT.

Re:BS "most popualar"

[UnknowingFool]

If they are counting all models of iPhone as one, they should count all Android phones as one too. In which case the iPhone is small fry - last year Android was estimated to have 1.4 billion active users.

All Android phones from different manufacturers? That's like saying if the most popular car is the Toyota Camry, then all American cars are more popular. Apple and oranges.

Re: BS "most popualar"

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

or the Bible at over 5 billion copies

Re:BS "most popualar"

[Fire_Wraith]

It's all about setting the terms to make yourself look good.

The question is what makes for a valuable metric. For instance, let's play with the terms a bit more. Has Apple sold more phones than, say, Samsung or Nokia? I'm talking all cellphones, not smartphones. For the sake of argument (and because I don't want to bother digging up the statistics) let's say that Nokia sold more phones, when you include feature/flip/etc cheap-o's. Why is that number less or more relevant? Why include the 2g iPhone, but not those? Basically someone is making a choice of where to draw the line on the category, one way or another. It's a PR/marketing move, so of course Apple wants to do it in a way that puts them in a favorable light. You say apples and oranges, but I say they were comparing Apple sales to Car sales to Album sales. Why is it a bad thing to want to compare fruit to fruit, in that vein?

I mean, to play devil's advocate in another way, McDonald's has sold however many billions of hamburgers, but what does that tell us compared to smartphones?

Big Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

The Big Mac is the most popular product of all time.

Re:Big Mac

[Nidi62]

Not to mention things like Blu Tac, Sellotape, a lot of brands of condoms, Bic Pens, most brands of cigarettes.

If you only look at durable goods, and you multiply the number manufactured by the useful lifetime, then I nominate the AK-47. Over 100 million have been manufactured, and many are still in use after more than 60 years.

Lord of War, while a little preachy, has one of the best gun comments ever: "the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. " Perfectly sums up the engineering simplicity of the gun, as well as the mark (good or bad) that it has had on the world. But it definitely has made a much bigger impact on the world than the iPhone has.

I think the most popular product...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be a knife. Everyone alive and dead has (had) at least one since longer than we've been human.

Product category compared to specific models

[Ecuador]

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?

Not for Everyone.

[Braintrust]

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