By SteveJack
Steve Jobs announced the opening of the iPhone and iPod touch today with an official SDK coming to developers in February 2008. Although it might not be explicitly stated in the open letter he posted to Apple.com, Jobs also announced that OS X users will double by June.
Let’s break it down: Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster is modeling around 3.2 million iPhones for calendar year 2007 and 12.4 million iPhones for calendar 2008. That’s roughly 9.4 million units by June. Ya think Apple can sell 1.5 times that many iPod touch units by then? With ease, I say. So, very conservatively, that’d be 14.1 million iPod touch units, plus 9.4 million iPhones, which conveniently comes out to 23.5 million. 23.5 million is just about how many Mac OS X users are currently in the world right now.
By June 2008, there will be at least double the devices running OS X as there are today: 47 million.
Sure, some of those will be iPhones and iPod touches that are owned by current Mac OS X users, but many won’t. Regardless, I doubt developers will care as they rush to create applications and solutions for OS X; many with multi-touch goodness baked right in. It’s delicious. (Plus, Jobs hasn’t even trotted out the multi-touch Mac OS X tablet, yet!) What’s that I hear? Is someone chanting “Developers, developers, developers…?”
Some may have called Jobs crazy and said, as did Bill Gates, that he could never win, but Jobs built it anyway. And now, here they come.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.