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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.
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
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.
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!
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
Apple supports their phones with updates longer than any other manufacturer. Even without updates, you can still use a first generation iPhone today.
Apple has been selling basically the same form factor -- the iPhone 5 for over four years.
- 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).
Not only does Apple not force you to replace their phone every 24 months. If you bought an iPhone 4s in September of 2011, you are still receiving updates.
Apple hasn't sold DRM'd music since 2008.
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".