So Apple reported earnings today and I've been staring at the numbers for like twenty minutes trying to make them feel real. 37 million iPhones. In one quarter. That's not a typo, that's just what happened between October and December of last year. For comparison, that's more phones than some countries have people. I did that math wrong on purpose because it's more fun that way, but you get the idea.
Profit was something like $13 billion for the quarter, which is the kind of number that stops meaning anything past a certain point. My brain just sort of slides off it. I can picture what $50 is (that's dinner for two if you're not being fancy). I cannot picture $13 billion. Nobody can. It's a number designed to be looked at, not understood.
What gets me is the timing. This is the first full holiday quarter with the iPhone 4S in it, the one that came out back in October with Siri, just two days before Steve Jobs died. I remember writing about that here at the time, how weird and sad it was that the launch and the news got tangled together in everyone's head. There was a lot of talk back then about whether the 4S was "enough" of an upgrade, whether people would be disappointed it wasn't some totally new design. Turns out nobody was disappointed. Turns out tens of millions of people did not care one bit that it looked like the 4. They just wanted an iPhone, and they went and bought one, in numbers that make the previous "best quarter ever" look like a rounding error.
And it wasn't just the phone. iPads sold something like 15 million units too, which is its own enormous number that's getting completely buried under the iPhone headline today. If any other company posted 15 million tablets sold in a quarter it'd be the only story in tech for a week. Here it's basically a footnote.
I keep thinking about how different the mood is right now compared to, say, ten days ago. We just came off a genuinely ugly week online, the SOPA blackout, Wikipedia going dark, the Megaupload thing happening literally the day after, Anonymous lighting up DOJ and MPAA websites in retaliation. It felt like the internet was at war with itself. And then today Apple just quietly drops a number so big it doesn't need spin, doesn't need a press conference, doesn't need anything except a press release with digits in it, and it's the biggest tech story of the week anyway. Funny how that works.
Worth remembering too that this is happening while everyone's still buzzing (a little) about CES from two weeks back, all those ultrabooks Intel was pushing so hard, all that "thin and light" messaging that was obviously aimed straight at the MacBook Air. I sat through some of that keynote coverage and honestly found it kind of a slog, lots of spec sheets, not a lot of "I need this in my bag tomorrow." Meanwhile Apple didn't say a word at CES, wasn't even really part of the conversation there, and then two weeks later just casually sells 37 million phones. There's a lesson in there somewhere about who actually needs to show up to these things and who doesn't.
I'll say this though: I don't think this pace is sustainable forever, and I don't say that to be a downer. Every big number eventually meets a bigger comparison point down the road and people act shocked when growth slows. That's just what growth curves do. But right now, today, sitting here in January 2012, it's hard to argue with 37 million of anything selling in twelve weeks.
Also, small unrelated complaint: I tried to buy a case for my own 4S at the Apple Store on Saturday and the line for the Genius Bar alone looked like it wrapped around the produce section of the mall. If a fraction of those people were also buying phones that day, no wonder the numbers look like this. I gave up and ordered one online instead, which honestly I should have just done in the first place.
Anyway. 37 million. Sit with that number for a second, because I sure am still sitting with it.