Apple Ships 1 Billion iOS Devices
As a part of its earnings report, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed the technology company has now shipped more than 1 billion iOS devices ranging from iPhones to iPads. The company’s holiday sales report is a company record-breaker. Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones during the three-month holiday period, which accumulated to a total of $18 billion in profit for the quarter, which is up by 46% compared to the previous quarter, and the profit is another all-time high for any company. No other company has hit a profit margin of that much. It was largely in part that, on average, Apple sold more than 34,000 iPhones “every hour, 24 hours a day, every day of the quarter,” according to Cook. That equates to a whopping 567 iOS devices per minute, or 9 iOS devices per second.
The total, which covers total iPhone and iPad shipments, was hit on November 22. The billionth iOS device shipped was a space-gray 64 GB iPhone 6 Plus, which Apple is keeping at its headquarters as a landmark. While Apple announced its results, the company’s marketing chief, Philip Schiller, revealed the news in a tweet: “1 billion iOS devices sold!” CEO Tim Cook believes that with future devices, such as the Apple Watch, the market need for iOS devices will continue to expand, and the “number of developers that are writing apps for it are impressive.”
Apple has a bright future ahead, with Apple’s sales continuing to climb. The company also revealed that HealthKit is in 600 apps; its Swift development tools have been downloaded 11 million times; over 30 auto brands have signed up for CarPlay; and more than 750 banks and credit unions are signed up to Apple Pay. Apple’s sales in China climbed 157 percent, and the company plans to have 40 retail stores in the country by mid-2016.
According to BusinessInsider, this is about on par with Android, as Garter estimated in December that 1.1 billion Android devices would ship in 2014.