4,475 iPods/hour x 30 hours = 134,250 iPods in 30 hours
Close enough. The point being that people had been waiting to buy this product for months and even with all the hype, they only did twice what the iPod does routinely.
Comparing this to the
initial ipod release isn't even fair, because I don't think there's anyone out there who didn't see this as an 'iPod phone' and already thought of it as the latest revision of the ipod which they probably already own. So much so I that I'd wager almost 100% of iPhone buyers had previously owned an ipod.
Huh? What did you mean by this comment?
I mean put the numbers in context: Just because they sold a ton of units doesn't mean the product is doing well. You have to sell what you need to sell in order to make a profit, and be profitable at the rate you want.
Apple profited $818m on sales of $5,410m last quarter. That's a profit margin of 15.1%.
That means, to keep up with the profitability of their other products, the iPhone has to make at least that much. Keep in mind the iphone could've cost upwards of $10m to develop, plus the hype machine which could've easily been $5m, plus the lost sales from postponing leopard, plus the lost sales of not hyping their mac offerings for a while (it's a marketing thing), and you have a serious investment that has to be paid off and get a 15.1% profit or higher.
If Apple can't make
that much money off the iPhone, they'll probably drop the product.
Now, I think that they will make at least that much, but bearing in mind it's all for **** until they do, this 270k is not that much.
People think that 270k in the first day is 'amazingomfg1!', but it's like opening weekend at the box office: sales decline exponentially after the first day, so estimating total future revenues from the first day is really pointless (though it's less so with movies, for obvious reasons).
Let's not forget that Zune sold a crapload of units the first day it came out. We all know where that is ending up.
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And by the way, someone was saying Apple only made $18/phone (they took the $5m recorded and divided it by 270k). This is wrong.
I've taken 2 years of accounting courses. Apple is doing what is called 'deferment' with their sales numbers. This means they mark some of their transactions as "not marked as revenue yet but it's assured we will." If you look at the deferred revenue for the iPhone/AppleTV/iPhone Accessories (they combine these in their statements), it's actually $180m. We'll say most of that is from the iphone just for kicks.
270/180000 is about $670/phone, minus the other stuff they lumped in which is of unknown value.
I think they're keeping the exact dollars in revenue a secret on purpose, I wont conjecture why. Also keep in mind that this is only revenue, not profit.
That $5m number is simply what they've bothered to mark as their revenue, for various reasons. They admit though that they will add $180m to their 'revenue' numbers soon.
So $18/phone is a silly number.