Apple Numbers Back Up Perceived Dominance

Apple held its first quarter earnings call yesterday. Amidst the dry financials and reporters eager to sneak in a question or two about LaLa or the Tablet, some interesting numbers emerged that back up what many of us already perceive. Apple is, as the popular Internet meme says, “crushing it” in the mobile space.

Apple sold 8.7 million new iPhone units, 21 million new iPods (a combined figure of all iPod types), and had 3 billion App Store downloads in the past quarter. Conservatively speaking, that’s more than 10 million new customers if you consider the 8.7 million iPhones along with 2 million new iPod touches. Those new customers are adopting a platform that already has millions upon millions of sales worldwide since its introduction.

To put the iPhone numbers alone into perspective, that’s as if everyone in Switzerland bought a new iPhone in the last quarter. I don’t think there is another mobile ecosystem with the rate of adoption as high as the iPhone. And more importantly, unlike its competitors, the iPhone’s adoption rate continues to increase. Those 8.7 million iPhone units sold were a 100% unit growth over the same quarter last year.

What does this dominance mean for the iPhone consumer?

For the iPhone user it means they’ve chosen a stable and widely adopted platform. It means they’ve chosen a device with such a breadth of applications and accessories that the ways they can experience the device continues to grow. For the iPhone developer it means an endless market for well developed and enjoyable games and applications. The personal computer market isn’t growing at a fraction of the rate of the mobile market and not even close again to the iPhone. I think most developers now understand the future is in developing for the iPhone platform.

What do you think? Is Apple now the dominant player in the mobile space? Can Google unseat them with the twin prongs of free software and remarkable hardware? Leave us your thoughts.

By: Erin Peterson

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