Apple has sold close to 1.6 billion iPhones during this decade.
“The last 10 years could be viewed as the iPhone decade — when smartphones went mainstream, created billion-dollar corporations, rearranged existing industries and changed the world,” Kif Leswing writes for CNBC:
Apple’s iPhone unit sales are dwarfed by Google’s Android operating system, which has shipped billions of devices as well. But as revealed in Apple’s knock-down legal battles with Samsung — perhaps the highest-profile tech litigation of the decade — Google and its Android partners took a fair amount of inspiration from Apple’s iPhone.
In the last 10 years, Apple has gone from a large computer company with a profitable side business in MP3 players to a $1 trillion megacorp with operations around the globe and 137,000 full-time employees. ″Unquestionably, it’s the most impactful consumer tech product over the past decade,” Loup Ventures founder and longtime Apple analyst Gene Munster said.
For years, Apple grew a giant stash of cash and marketable securities on the back of its iPhone sales, but in 2018, after tax reform, it indicated it planned to distribute the majority of that wealth to its shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends.
Those buybacks helped the stock price grow over 900% on a split-adjusted basis. A million dollars invested in Apple on Jan 1, 2010, would be worth over $9.13 million last Friday, after a 7-1 stock split in 2014.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s our own SteveJack’s first take on Apple’s revolutionary iPhone the day it was released (well, technically, his second, after he predicted the iPhone five years prior to its debut) . SteveJack saw what Apple’s device really was and what it would become on the day it was unveiled:
The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name (January 9, 2007)
Apple really only botched one thing with the iPhone – its name.
Apple’s “iPhone” isn’t really a phone at all. It’s really a small touchscreen Mac OS X computer, a Mac nano tablet, if you will. Here’s how misnamed the iPhone is: Some people are complaining that Jobs didn’t spend enough time on the Mac in his keynote! Folks, iPhone is not only a Mac, it’s the most radical new Mac in years! What’s to stop Apple from making a 12-inch model (and larger, and smaller) one of these days (use the headset for the phone, please) and calling it a Mac tablet?
It has an iPod built in, yes, so it can be used solely as a “true video widescreen iPod,” if that’s what you want… But, the main thing about the “iPhone” is that it’s really a pocket Mac. It has email, SMS, full-featured Web browsing, and much more. But, beyond that, it is a platform that’s just sitting there waiting for Apple to sell software for it. Just imagine games with the large multi-touch display and the built-in accelerometer!
Imagine all of the other software possibilities, too…
Maybe Apple named it iPhone because of all of the free publicity and buzz that name has already garnered. Maybe they want this trojan horse to slip into the market first under the guise of being the best smartphone available and they’ll exploit its capabilities as a full-fledged platform later. Perhaps it’s easier to explain and sell as a phone first…
So, yeah, it can be a phone, even the very best smartphone, but it’s so much more and holds so much promise that the name “iPhone” hardly does it justice. – SteveJack, MacDailyNews, January 9, 2007