I actually think UMD wasn't a bad idea at all. There is no way that Sony could have made games that were 1-2gb on flash carts for cheap back in 2004 when the PSP released. The size of the disc prevented super long load times as well. 

There were definitely flaws, but I do think it was a necessary thing for the time. 

Sony should just confirm all their consoles final numbers once they cease to manufactor them.
I loved PD having all their sales of Gran Turismo per game displayed on their site back then.

FY 2012: 7.0 million
FY 2013: 4.1 million
FY 2014: 3.3 million

A total of 14.4 million for these 3 years (PSP+PSV).

82.5 - 76.4 gives us an additional 6.1 million between April 1, 2012 and March 31, 2015 for the PSP.

And leaving 8.3 million for the PSVita.

PSVita sales were not included in FY 2011, but we know' it sold 1.8 million units at 31/03/2012.

So for the PSVita there were 10.1 million consoles sold as of March 31, 2015.

We still need to know its figures sales for the FY2015-FY2019 period.

We don't know how much it has done in the rest of the world but we have some estimates of the most important markets :

The most realistic LTD for PSV should be between 15 ~ 16 million.

Tell that to Kanjiklub the Covenant Wikipedia. Apparently, Shawn Layden isn't a reliable enough source for them. *shrug*

Anywho, there's never been an exact number given for the final tally for a system before. They're usually rounded off to the nearest 10k or 100k. And this does confirm the PSP just edged out the GBA's lifetime total.

Well, it is odd that he is releasing data that previously was not publicly available.  I can understand skepticism around the number, given this circumstance.  In many respects, he seems like an extremely credible source for this info. But, it's hard for me to think of a reason why an ex Sony employee would release non-public information years after leaving his job at the company. 

Who is Shawn Layden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Layden

I'm well aware the GBA was more profitable, and its successor is the best-selling Nintendo hardware ever. And at that, DS only trails the PS2 by a few million.
But it's still absolutely wild to think that the PSP even narrowly outsold the GBA at all, as we previously knew it narrowly fell short of it.
That means PSP outsold GBA, 3DS, and probably the Game Boy and Game Boy Color on their own if Nintendo would've done the smart thing and not combined their totals in sales numbers.
Also, I don't think Switch Lite on its own will touch the lifetime sales of the PSP. We don't have concrete numbers of Switch Lite to date, but I would doubt it's above 30-35 million.
And it just continues to show how much Sony screwed the pooch with Vita. Not enough first-party support (or even big third-party exclusives), expensive required memory cards, hardware gimmicks that weren't needed, etc.

@Wman1996 To be fair, it's very hard for a company to have two successful consoles in one generation. If the Vita had done better, it likely would've led to slightly less sales of the PS4. Even Nintendo has had trouble supporting two systems at one time. They continued to lose marketshare from SNES-GCN and only enjoyed increased sales for a few years on DS & Wii until the casual audience left. For what it's worth, it was on the market a lot longer than the GBA was (which only had 3 years before a successor released).

Definitely not knocking PSP sales though. The machine was incredible, but it would have been very hard for Sony to follow it up with a successful successor. Also worth pointing out that the only PlayStation home console so far to not exceed 100 million sales was released around the same time as the PSP.

Switch Lite shipments by June 30th 2023 were at 21.45m. (90.23m for the original Switch, 17.85m for the OLED model)