During the It’s only rock and roll, but we like it special music event, as usual, Apple spent some time up front discussing numbers. And as is increasingly usual when it comes to the music leg of their business, those numbers tend towards the HUGE. To date:

• 30 million iPhones sold
• 20 million iPod touches sold

That makes 50 million iPhone OS X platform device on the market, up from 45 million on July 21.

• 75,000 apps in the iTunes App Store
• 1.8 billion downloads (not counting updates)

Still no breakdown of paid vs. free, but up from 3,000 this time last year, and 65,000 and 1.5 billion back on July 14.

In terms of games, compared with other mobile platforms, here’s the library count:

• 21,178 for Apple iPhone/iPod touch
• 3,680 for Nintendo DS
• 607 for Sony PSP

But wait, there’s more…

iTunes and iPod is still doing gangbusters.

• #1 music retailer in the world
• 100,000,000 accounts (credit cards) on file
• 8.5 billion songs sold
• 27 million libraries submitted and analyzed by Genius
• 54 billion songs submitted and analyzed by Genius
• 100 million iPod nanos sold
• 220 million iPods in total sold

What do those numbers look like in the MP3 player space — which everyone including Apple believes is a shrinking business compared to more heavily convergent devices like the iPhone?

• 73.3% iPod
• 17.9% Other
• 7.2% Sandisk
• 1.1% Microsoft

Zune numbers look down from last year, iPod not wildly better. Maybe everyone including Apple is right? Still, even on a downward curve:

• Over 50% of iPod owners are new to the platform

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple Music Event by the Numbers: 30M iPhones, 20M iPod touches, 75K Apps, 1.8B Downloads

Yeah, so if the analysts are to be believed — and Hollywood is wrong about the world ending first – - Apple might just sell 82+ million iPhones in 2012 (not by 2012, but 82+ million that year alone!) accounting for 5.7% of the market.

RBC guestimates that Apple will dominate the media-centric category of smartphones, much as RIM will dominate productivity, leaving Palm and perhaps others to fill out 2-3 additional categories like personal information management, cloud-focused, etc.

The growth in smartphones is expected to come not only at the expense of feature phones, but of PC-class devices as well (fulfilling the so-called Post-PC prophecy).

Personally, we’re waiting for Apple to make an iPhone with the compute power of a MacBook Air that I can just dock into a MacBook shell when I need to do more serious work. Cloud storage, mobile compute power, dockable productivity. That’s the future we’d like…

[via MacRumors]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Analyze This: 82+ Million iPhones to be Sold in 2012?

Apple is set to announce their Q1 results at 5pm EST (2pm PST) and TiPb will bring you any and all iPhone related news that comes of it. In the meantime, analysts are saying that regardless of how well (or poorly?) the iPhone did during the holiday quarter, it did better than the Android G1. Quotes Apple Insider:

Based on polls of recent cellphone buyers, the analyst firm believes T-Mobile USA may have sold upwards of 300,000 of its touchscreen G1 handsets from launch in late October through to the end of 2008. In contrast, even Morgan Stanley’s prediction of about 1.75 million iPhone 3G units sold through AT&T is about 5.9 times greater than what T-Mobile is believed to have managed.

(Note: That’s the US T-Mobile, not the German T-Mobile which is busy boosting iPhone sales with heavy discounts.) Are the analysts right? Is this comparing international Apples to domestic Oranges… er… G1s? We’ll have to wait in see. Regardless of what the iPhone sells, Bullish Cross (via Daring Fireball) reminds us:

Apple’s use of subscription-based accounting for iPhone revenue has significantly hurt its share price — casual investors who are only looking at Apple’s GAAP results don’t realize how much revenue they’ve deferred.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Did the iPhone Outsell the Google Android G1 by 6 to 1?

Apple is reporting their Q4, 2008 financial results, and while things look good for the Mac, they look great for the iPhone, with 6,892,000 units sold during the 3 month period, up from 1,119,000 in the same quarter last year. And YES! Apple has already made their 10 million iPhone in 2008 goal, with the holiday season still to come. This makes Apple, dollar-for-dollar, the third largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world (after Nokia and Samsung), and Apple has only been in the space since June 2007!

Says Apple CEO, Steve Jobs:

“Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone—we sold more phones than RIM.”

Boom!

Mac’s hit 2.6 million, iPod’s at 11 million (not breakout for iPod Touch, as usual).

Conference call is currently underway (and Steve’s on the call!).

Here are some highlights:

When asked why Apple only had 1 iPhone SKU, Steve replied (paraphrased), Babe Ruth only had 1 home run… he just kept hitting it.

On the same topic, Steve said that while other companies made dozens of different voice units, he believes software was becoming the differentiating factor, and that presenting developers with multiple device versions wasn’t compelling. He also said Apple’s competition didn’t come from software backgrounds like Apple did.

When asked if RIM having around 50% upgrades vs. new users, if the iPhone had a greater number of new users, did that make Apple’s true success against RIM higher, Steve maintained he was happy just to beat RIM on the direct numbers.

No direct US vs. International split for iPhone sales were given.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Updated: 10 Million iPhones in 2008! 7 Million in last 3 Months! Apple Q4 Results!