The iPhone 4S has been announced with Tim Cook taking stage as for his first product launch since he became the CEO. He started with expressing that he loves Apple and in trademark Apple style highlighted the milestones achieved by Apple in the last few quarters. Be it the Mac, the iPods or the iPhone / iPad, he gave a perspective on each of these. Here is a quick compilation of the milestones Apple has announced at yesterdays keynote:
a) App Store
Apple has made the App Store a key USP for iPhone for many years. It also extends to the iPad and the iPod touch. So what did Apple reveal about the App Store at the iPhone 4S launch? There are over half million apps on the iTunes App Store, the count for iPad specific apps is at 140,000. The App Store without a doubt is the no 1 store for apps, with over 18 billion apps downloaded in a little over 3 years. Current momentum is over a billion apps every month. Apple sure wants to highlight that it has paid over $3 billion apps to iOS developers, that’s crazy market size for just one category of product with 5 different models out in the market (2 iPads, 2 iPhones and the iPod touch 4G).
b) iOS / iPhone
Apple has over 250 million iOS devices out there, this includes iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Thats a huge ecosystem. While Android is said to take over iOS in shipment numbers, the fact remains that iOS claims 61% of browser marketshare. That figure speaks for itself.
iPhone has 5% marketshare in the handsets market. Apple isn’t showing figures in the smartphone market, they consider all phones would be smart and it is 1.5 billion units big. Clearly, Apple is setting the bar high for themselves. Speaking of iPhone 4, in the last 15 months it has sold more than 50% of total iPhone sales. That’s with a 125% YoY compared to 74% for entire smartphone industry.
93% of Fortune 500 companies testing or deploying the iPhone. Apple also touted that iPhone stands #1 in Customer Satisfaction ranking out there. The stats speak for themselves.
c) iPods
iPod is special to Apple, it marked the comeback of a company that was written off in the late 90s. The iPod is the number one music player in the world and the US marketshare is a crazy 78%. Total iPod sales have been over 300 million and just last year Apple has sold 45 millions. Clearly, the line of thinking is different from Microsoft who have discontinued their Zune players in favor of Windows Phone 7. A lot of people buying the iPod are buying it for the first time, a very encouraging figure for Apple.
d) iTunes
iTunes is to iPod what App store is to iOS. Clearly, Apple caught a market early and still dominates it. The number one music seller, iTunes offers 20 million songs and 16 billion songs have been downloaded till date. Compared to apps, thats a much smaller number, but then, do consider that Apps can also be free!
d) Macs
Tim Cook compared the roll-out of the OS X Lion upgrade to Windows 7. Stats he showed claimed that Windows took 20 weeks to reach 10% of its install base and Lion did that in 2 weeks. Lion has seen 6 million downloads. Talking about the Mac ecosystem, Apple revealed that while the PC market is growing Year on Year is 4%, Mac’s growth is 23%. One of four laptops sold in United States is a Mac, thus making the MacBook the most selling laptop in US. Total Mac install base is approaching 60 million (currently hovering around 58 million).
Yet Apple’s market share is just 23% in US, thus giving Apple a huge growth opportunity in the PC industry. The figure used to be in single digits and it is great to see how it has jumped to 23%. Microsoft sure is watching.