Good grief selling one billion of anything is a huge milestone. Don't be ridiculous.
Gotta love them MacRumors readers. If they announced that Tim Cook was going to personally deliver vanilla ice cream to every man, woman, and child on the planet, we'd get responses of "I hate vanilla!" and "
Steve would have given us chocolate!"
(Never mind that most of those posting the above haven't sold more that five of anything. And those were cups of lemonade from their front yard stand. When they were four. And their customers were all family members.)
It's not just that Apple sold a
billion iPhones, it's that there was no guarantee they could sell
any at all - they talked one carrier into trying it, on Apple's terms, and then
changed the underlying nature of the phone market. Does everyone here have fond memories of the days when the
only things you could put on your phone was what your carrier deigned to sell? And mostly that was $3 MIDI ringtones? When you were lucky to get one software update*, ever, for your phone, which fixed nothing of interest?
*: (hi Android folks, sorry the "only one or two updates before being written off" still applies to many of you.)
Once Apple got one carrier to carry the iPhone, it was such a runaway success that the other carriers all wanted it, and Apple used that as a wedge to force more user-friendly policies (because Apple's customer is
you, not AT&T et al.) - no crappy $3 ringtones (yes, I know Apple worked a 99 cent ringtone deal with the record labels, but that was for actual songs, and instructions abounded across the Internet on how to make and load your own), you got the ability to load all sorts of your own media, no carrier name emblazoned in 26pt type across the front of your phone as a constant reminder of how lucky you were to be on their network, and, eventually, and App Store, where, yes, Apple ran the gate and took a cut, but basically
anyone could write and submit apps, instead of having to beg each carrier for permission to access their customers. Keep in mind that Samsung, and Motorola, and LG, and the others were happy playing by the old rules with the carriers, where the phone you got was emblazoned with the carrier's name who had complete accept/reject control over every feature, because they were the customer, not you.
Apple did all that. They haven't just sold one billion phones, they made the smartphone landscape as it stands today
possible, affecting the way people live their lives.
They are the reason you have a smartphone today that has a full-blown web browser rather than one that suits the carrier's needs, the reason you can buy and install software written by millions of different people instead of the five companies the carrier negotiated deals with, the reason that phone manufacturers have to compete on
capabilities and, carriers have to compete on
service and price. And why phone manufacturers have to compete to make
users happy rather than making the
carriers happy.
