It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.
Dediu was inspired to dig out his graphing software when he read this statement from Cook:
This 55 is something no one would have guessed. Including us. To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones. And so, this thing is, as you said, it’s on a trajectory that’s off the charts
His chart shows the cumulative sales of various Apple products on one axis, and the time since launch on the other. The numbers come from
The lines are rather startling. As you can see, the iPhone caught up with the entire 28 years of Mac sales in just four years. Not bad for a device that costs at least $650. And with the iPad’s sales acceleration giving even Apple’s executives nosebleeds, it won’t be long before the tablet also surpasses the Mac. And they say that the iPad isn’t a real computer.
But most amazing of all is the speed at which iOS devices are selling. In 2011, more iOS devices were sold in one year than Apple has sold Macs since 1984. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. Apple is shifting more pocket and handheld computers in a year that it managed to sell Macs in almost 30 years. I predict a bright future for the iPad.
