“The iPhone is not only the best selling mobile phone but also the best selling music player, the best selling camera, the best selling video screen and the best selling computer of all time,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco.
Dediu writes, “It is, quite simply, the best selling product of all time.”
“It is that because it is so much more than a product. It is an enabler for change. It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive, let alone control,” Dediu writes. “It changed the world because it changed us.”
Dediu writes, “And it did all that in less than nine years.”
Full article, with a list of the world’s best-selling products across several categories, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Revolutionary.
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The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name – January 9, 2007
McDonalds and the Coca-Cola company might dispute the “best selling product of all time” BS.
Consumables obviously don’t count, you fscking simpleton.
What’s next, are you going to claim Post-it Notes or Bic pens outsold iPhone because you can’t give Apple its due even when it’s so obviously EARNED?
I hate fscking pissants like you. You’re emblematic of all that’s wrong in this world. GFY.
Um, I agree with your point, but do you disproportionate response much?
If it’s not upgradable it is consumable…..
Sorry dad we filled the ashtrays so we need a new car!
I consume a Coke in about 10 minutes. I buy 1 iPhone every two years, and a new Mac every 4-6 years. I don’t think your definition holds water. I would also argue that every iOS update is an upgrade, so the iPhone is, indeed, upgradable.
Of course I am referring to hardware upgradability. No sd slot is planned obsolescence. Sorry.
The iPhone is fantastic, but it’s not the best selling product of all time. I mean come on, because the iPhone is great, we now have to lie about it? Probably it is outsold by Bic pens. I’m sure it’s outsold by Intel chips, which they sell more than 100 million of every year.
McD’s just announced a quarterly profit of 1.08 billion.
Apple 7.8 billion. Much of it in the iPhone.
(and that is in the ‘slow quarter’ before the next iPhone launch and Christmas).
I guess we can look at ‘best selling’ in different ways.
If I had a business I’ll rather look at profit than number of units moved…
note that Ford made $2 billion so the iPhone by itself outsold in profit ALL the cars, trucks etc sold by Ford.
I didn’t do enough research so I can’t say for sure but I suspect iPhone is the most profitable single product ever.
Don’t speak too loud!.😷😷Apple needs to lay low. Or else Apple got to be jealous!. Apple got enough problems from jealousy. 😜😥
Was, I think the right word is was.
yeah. it’s only North america. period. time has been changed a lot. people don’t care whether new iphone is out or not nowadays. iphone just doesn’t have any advantage anymore. technology is way behind other phone company. especially Samsung Galaxy.
apple’s advatages are not blowing up and have an os that is very efficient it is only dual core and 1.8ghz yet it still competes with 8 core 2.6ghz chips
I think Horace’s point is to attempt to identify iPhone as a profound influence on the human species, by using “best-selling” as a proxy for “agent of change”. Taking this very long view, the myriad Android collective is merely a long shadow cast by iPhone — its design as successful in its time as that of trilobytes in the Paleozoic, its cosmic rhythm a unique time signature stamped into the music of the spheres.
The brilliant comedian Lenny Bruce said in a bitter monologue, sometimes there’s only one lone guy in your audience, a recently unemployed plumber. And he’s going to take it all out on you, the shit he had to clean up, the shit he took from his boss, the shit he takes every day from everyone in the world all day long, every day. So you’re up here with the microphone and you think, yeah, I identify with that guy. Shit flows in every direction, there’s no escaping it. But you don’t have to eat it, you can laugh about it, wipe it off. At least you have choices, godammit!
I don’t know him to call him by his first name, but Deidu is full of shit. Of course it’s also the best selling whatever. If it had a backscratcher it would also be the best selling backscratcher of all time, but that only counts if it’s the reason for buying.
Dediu. The name is hard to spell and the insights are hard to follow from a man of few words, more a dreamer and a poet than a hardcore engineer or management theorist. He is all of that. But I agree with you on the face of it—he’s full of shit, there are more eyeglasses and transmission shafts than iPhones— but I also know he is trying hard to get at a valuable and elusive principle that he thinks is hiding inside this smartphone phenomenon, something that is transformative in a different way than other products. If he ever succeeds in isolating this alchemical essence, he’s all ready to apply it to transportation, which he’s studied and maintains is ripe for disruption.
In a way, Horace Is Peter Pan, still in touch with the wonder and magic of transformation, which have worn off most of the rest of us. He never believed the world-weary nostrum of Ecclesiastes 1:9 that there is nothing essentially new. He set himself up as an industry analyst because he noticed that conventional thinkers were constantly underestimating Steve Jobs’s original thinking. They stll do.