As part of the Apple Q2 2009 financial reports, they revealed that 37 million iPhones and iPod Touches have been sold. I will assume here that sold = shipped to retail when it comes to financial results, although since both devices need to be activated via iTunes, Apple probably has a very accurate number of the total sellthrough.
The interesting bits are:
-In Q2 Apple shipped about 7 million iPhone OS devices, the iPhone accounted for 3.8 million and was up 123% year over year, the iPod Touch also more than doubled sales year over year.
-In December, the mix between iPhone and iPod Touch was 17 million to 13 million, currently it is roughly 21 million to 16 million. The iPhone is selling faster than the iPod Touch.
-Apple thinks the App Store has been the reason for the growth of the iPod Touch sales, and in particular game sales: "Hitting about 1 billion downloads in 9 months is very exciting, all genres are very popular, but games are quite popular. That's one of the reasons the iPod touch has been such a success." (As for the iPhone there have obviously been numerous other factors: launch of the 3G and hugely increased worldwide availability being the biggest ones to drive sales.)
-Total financial results for Apple were: revenue $8.16 billion, up 9%, net income $1.2 billion, current cash reserves $28.9 billion, up $800 million from December. These figures are GAAP, non-GAAP results that take into account the subsrciption nature of iPhone sales are: $9.06 billion in sales and $1.66 billion net income.
-Sold 2.22 million Macs, down 3% year over year but still better than the overall industry which is down 7%.
These results are clearly better than what I was expecting, and I'm especially surprised at how much the iPod Touch sales have picked up YoY. Since the 2G iPod Touches are not much different from the 1G, I believe it really is the App Store that is driving sales. Another factor in the sales could be that the iTunes Store went DRM-free, but I doubt it would affect sales that much.
On another part of the conference call, Apple stated that they have to Netbook coming, but that they are watching the market and if they feel they can bring something really innovative to the table there, they will do it. Similar tones as in December, but at that time they were just watching the market. IMO this statement only fuels the rumors about a touchscreen device that sits between the MacBook and iPhone/iPod Touch in size.
The other news is of course the one billion downloads from the App Store. Apple does not release any specifics about the paid vs. free ratio, or the ratio of games vs. other software downloaded. Still, given that the store hit 500 million downloads in January this year, the pace is quickening. Also, the number of Apps has more than doubled since January when it was at 15 000. If this keeps up, we'll be looking at easily over 3 billion downloads by the end of the year. That is likely to equal something like a billion dollars in my estimates (2.5 billion downloads this year, 80% free apps, average price of paid apps 2 dollars). A huge market for smaller devs, but I doubt even bigger devs want to be left out.
