“This month, the hip iPhone celebrates its first anniversary, following its riotous launch last June 29. Its birth followed six months of prerelease hype that was ignited by Apple Inc. CEO and industry luminary Steve Jobs,” Matt Hamblen reports for Computerworld.
“The company that brought you the Macintosh computer, and the fabulously successful iPod and iTunes, has jumped — well, dive-bombed, really — into the wireless phone business like no cell phone vendor before,” Hamblen reports.
“No cell phone, nor arguably any electronic device, has ever generated so much interest so quickly,” Hamblen reports.
“‘Few companies have managed to penetrate such buyer mind share with a single device in a year’s time,’ says Michael Gartenberg, a JupiterResearch LLC analyst and a Computerworld columnist,” Hamblen reports.
“‘It seems strange to say there’s a coolness factor with iPhone, but it does involve extraordinary attention to details in hardware and software,’ Gartenberg notes. ‘It doesn’t feel like any other phone,'” Hamblen reports.
“Its software development kit, announced in March, has attracted the interest of 500,000 developers, and analysts say it could lead to literally hundreds of new applications being distributed to users via Apple’s AppStore,” Hamblen reports.
“iPhone has altered the smart-phone landscape,” Hamblen reports.
Full article here.
You ain’t seen nothing, yet.
Being an early adopter has its perks.
Yet it still has not managed to break the 1% mark predicted by Jobs.
But, then, the SDK isn’t really ready yet, now. Is it? Soon, Grasshopper …
Where’s Zune Tang? Can’t wait to hear about the next super duper windows phone, which won’t in anyway do the equivalent of a belly flop into an empty pool.
I used to lug around my laptop everywhere. I got an iPhone on 6/30, and by degrees have left the laptop home.
Once FileMaker is released for the iPhone, that’ll be about it.
I stand by the statement from the rocket scientists at eAccess. The iPhone is an utter and complete failure.
apple will have sold roughly 6,5 million units of iphone 1.0 in the one year since last june. i can’t imagine that they are happy with that. the iphone is by far the most advanced phone ever produced and also the most fun to use, so why did they sell so little by comparison?
as a stockholder i really hope that apple has found a better way to market and sell iteration 2.0.
Once the AppStore hits, we won’t know what we ever did without it. It’s like the revolution will start all over again while competitors still struggle to reach 2007.
Hopefully for the second round I’ll be copying & pasting and using the landscape keyboard to e-mail and text. I already forgo the mail app and use Safari so I can type in landscape form and delete multiple e-mails. Apple should be ashamed of that.
I hope 2.0 is open to other carriers. AT&T;doesn’t look to have good coverage in central Illinois. I have no problem with my Verizon coverage.
Imagine how many more they’ll sell if they open it up to more than AT&T;.
Given the constraints on the available market (primarily US) and service providers, the iPhone results appear excellent to me. They may not meet the ‘wildest expectations’ of analysts and the public, but what product/event ever does?
The quotes included in the article are glowing – clearly Apple has been extraordinarily successful with the first year of the iPhone. I personally believe that the release of iPhone2 with third party apps will make the first year of the iPhone look like a “hobby.”
“No cell phone, nor arguably any electronic device, has ever generated so much interest so quickly,” Hamblen reports.
“‘Few companies have managed to penetrate such buyer mind share with a single device in a year’s time,’ says Michael Gartenberg…
@Ralph – For a beta unit – and beta market – 6.5 million seem quite impressive to me.
I type this on my 4GB iPhone which was not easy to get to Europe back in July 07.
MDN magic word: (out)law
Most people don’t know yet that they need a smart phone, but they will soon. The first hurdle is cleared and now the ball is reaching the crest of the hill, fixing to trample everything in its path on the way down…yes, even the Blackberries.
RIMM shareholders should ask for an iPhone 3 competitor, because their only going to get a iPhone 1 competitor near the end of the year.
I would drop the price another $50 bucks before the competition does, though. I can’t wait ’til Monday!! Hold the calls of all the top tech boardrooms…they will be busy watching the keynote to find out their next reverse technology invention and to figure out how will they will play the words to downplay the version 2 iPhone. Price drop is about all they can swing, so Apple should also deliver by knocking off another $50 bucks while delivering even more.
Ralph,
What would have made you happy?
Apple enters a market it has never been in, one that has large, entrenched players, and it takes a significant chunk of its segment of the market in less than one year, and you’re not happy?
You must be the life of the party.
Just don’t call it a phone…
Stealth Mac-nano is more like it!
Unstoppable force no?
All I know is that Jobs promised there would be 10 Million iPhones sold between the launch date (6/29/2007) and the end of 2008. They will end up very easily surpassing that goal.
Ralph from Berlin…
6.5 million units is well within their stated aims and – more importantly – accelerating faster than iPod which took 27 months to get to just under 5.5 million units.
By the time iPhone gets to 27 months (end of September 09), Apple should be looking at around 25 million units in total, although – depending on the level of developer interest – that figure could be as high as 40 million units; thereafter, the sales will really start to ramp up with sales of 25-50 million units (again dependent on how much we see from developers) in FY2010.
In other words, we might – if commercial and internal developers get their act together – be talking about 90 million units cumulative by the end of September 2011 which is more than good enough, considering that it will effectively triple the number of OS X users in the world and unequivocally secure the future of the OS X platform (both on the Mac and on portable devices for the forseeable future.
@Ralph
The iPod sold just 376,000 units in its first year. Would you agree that the iPod’s sales right out of the gate did not portend its future dominance? How does 6.5 million compare with 0.4 million in your eyes?
I guess you are just a ‘glass-half-empty’ kind of guy.
Look at this moronic statement and you will see why parents are opting out of wasting money on sending their kids to college:
“As the innovation leader, the iPhone is currently facing fierce competition from look-alike and feature-alike products. Apple cannot let up on innovation, because its competitors certainly will not,” says Gloria Barczak, professor of marketing at Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration.”
Poor Gloria doesn’t seem to know how to distinguish between “innovate” and “copy”. She even says it herself…”from look-alike and feature-alike products.” That’s just another way of saying “Me Too”, Gloria. Me-Too is not innovation.
500,000 developers… hundreds of applications?
try thousands! Can’t wait!
“…500,000 developers, and analysts say it could lead to literally hundreds of new applications…” So, we should expect only one new application for every 1,000 developers? Granted, many will be custom, in-house apps – the sort that helped entrench Windows in the enterprise – but I fully expect *thousands* of new apps – so many most won’t even appreciate what’s out there.
Think back to the release of Tiger’s Dashboard. A few dozen sample apps at the time of release, thousands today. But unlike those who developed those little applets, most of those developing with the SDK see a business opportunity, a chance to get in on the ground floor of something big.
iPhone made NO dent in Europe whatsoever. The sales in German were downright pathetic.
Ease up with the hype already..
@FUDS
“iPhone made NO dent in Europe whatsoever. The sales in German were downright pathetic.
Ease up with the hype already..”
Uhh sure yeah the millions sold mean nothing because the German’s decided not to get an iPhone in the same mass numbers as everyone else. You’re right total failure.
So should Apples should just close it’s doors and give the money back to the share holders because some Germans didn’t like the price and/or features the phone had? How about recognizing that the iPhone has been wildly successful despite the slow sales in Germany?
iPhone made no dent in Europe until the price was cut, then people didn’t seem to mind that it didn’t have 3G, MMS, full Bluetooth or any of that other stuff.
If the new version is cheaper and more capable as well as being available through a wider distribution channel and on multiple carriers in the majority of markets, sales will undoubtedly be better.
However, when you throw in a deep applications portfolio being grown by 500,000 developers alongside support for ActiveSync-compatible messaging servers, you’re going to see a logarithmic jump in sales as enterprises discover the joy of having a platform that combines…
• Voice
• Mail
• Personal Information Management
• A portable presentation environment
• An extensible application delivery platform that will use either cellular or wi-fi data access, backed up by an easy-to-use application development framework.
Face it: the first year of iPhone was a beta program designed to find the must-haves and the show-stoppers. The next three years will be different and some people are going to have some sleepless nights as they work out how to respond.
Oh, and I forgot, GAMES.
I’m willing to bet that overseas sales—including Germany—will skyrocket with the advent of the 3G iPhone. Not to mention the boost the SDK will provide.
> 500,000 … telecoms; ISPs; hackers; competitors; jailbreakers; IT; website and widget creators; tinkerers; porn, theme, dating and ringtone entrepreneurs [they go together]…. With a camera in front, the hand-held porn industry should explode.