5 Million iPhones sold is not the big news from Apple

Apple had a press release today titled "iPhone 5 Weekend Sales Top Five Million".  But that was not the big news from this weekend or even from that press release.  And no it had nothing to do with Maps or Youtube apps or where you find your podcasts.  Nope the big news from this past weekend and week was the number of devices now running iOS 6 - 100 Million!!!!

 

Don't get me wrong 5 Million iPhones sold in the first 3 days was very impressive - the only launch close was last years iPhone 4S launch.  But that 4 Million sold in the first weekend logistically was not nearly as impressive as this years 5 Million.  And Apple said they could have sold more if they had more iPhone 5's to sell.  Why I think logistically it is more impressive this year.  Last year the iPhone 4S had the luxury of using some of the same components as the iPhone 4.  This year the metal case is brand new, as is the screen both in size and technology.  There is even a new dock connector (don't get me started on that). This time around Apple's supply chain did not have the advantage of a previous generations device to borrow capacity from.  This time it was from zero to 5 million units and components for said units at launch.  That is pretty impressive.  Congrats to Apple and its suppliers for pulling that off - even if it was still not up to demand.

 

But again to me the biggest news was not about the aforementioned 5 Million iPhone 5's - nope - it was about the 100 Million iOS devices that are now running iOS 6 after just 5 days.  To compare that to last year - when iOS 5 launched last year Apple announced only 25 Million devices had upgraded.  A 4X increase year over year is really impressive and great news to devcelopers of iOS Apps.

 

If you want to see how big a deal this is vs say Android.  Jelly bean - aka Android 4.1 launched in early July.  Through early September - over 2 months after the launch of Jelly Bean - Android had 1.47% adoption. (And Android fan boys thought that was good news - Yikes!!).  Working out the numbers 1.46% of about 450 Mil Android devices is about 6.6 Million Android devices in 60 days that have been able to be updated to the latest version of their OS vs over 100 Million iOS devices in just 5 days now running the lastest version of iOS.  This is again why it is so important if you are a developer to develop first for iOS.  You can be assured that when you are developing for the latest version - there is actually an audience for your app.