Forget those measly estimates of 500,000 to 700,000 iPhones sold on the first weekend. They’re just analyst guesses, and we’re five days removed from the iPhone’s opening weekend by now anyway. Instead, allow me to redirect your attention to a number which (unless AT&T has forgotten how to count that high) represents a hard and fast representation of the current size of the iPhone user base: as of mid-week, more than one million people have activated an iPhone through AT&T.
The number is a couple days old by now but we’ll take it. Even setting aside the additional iPhone sales that have taken place in the past day or two that aren’t in that tally, figure there have been significantly more than a million iPhones sold. Despite the enthusiasm typically displayed by early adopters of a new class of product, it’s a virtual certainly that a good portion of purchased iPhones haven’t been activated yet. There are the users who are still trying to decide just how to go about breaking their current contract or how to get their cell numbers transferred, those users who have received iPhones as gifts and haven’t been in as much of a hurry to activate them as someone would be who actually waited in line for one, and those iPhones purchased as upcoming birthday gifts which haven’t even been given to the recipient yet.
But let’s not waste time trying to calculate the overage. Instead let’s focus on the fact that as the iPhone’s first week on the market comes to a close, there are already more than one million active iPhone users. I say “active” because anyone who’s activated their iPhone not only has a phone number for it, they’re also paying monthly service charges, which means that the thing likely isn’t sitting in a drawer collecting dust. So we have more than a million people who are actually using their iPhones as you read this. Okay, there’s a chance they might instead be sleeping or taking a shower at this very moment (two of the relatively few tasks during which you can’t very well use your iPhone – come on waterproof cases!), but you all know what I’m getting at here…
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a platform.
Let’s take a look back at the iPod’s relatively low-key launch in 2001. It’s too late in the week to go digging for the actual statistic, but let’s just say that it look Apple a long time to sell their first million iPods. As such, you could walk into an electronics store back in early 2002 and ask if they sold iPod accessories and often times the salesperson would just stare at you wondering what an iPod was. It’s not just that the iPod didn’t have any hype surrounding its initial rollout; it’s that there weren’t enough of us going around asking for support of our new platform – and that’s simply because in the early days, there weren’t enough of us using iPods.
So while the one million active iPhones are dwarfed by the fact that there have been well over a hundred million iPods sold over the years, fear not. The rise of the iPhone as a mainstream platform will be graced by a much steeper trajectory than the iPod initially saw, as the iPhone platform is already too large to simply ignore. One week into it, and one out of every three hundred Americans already has an iPhone. Even though the ubiquity of the iPod and the cell phone have opened the to door for the mainstreaming of handheld consumer electronics devices here in 2007, building a platform of a million handheld users is still no small feat. For all the money that Microsoft has sunk into marketing the Zune, the company has just this week sold its one millionth unit, and that’s after more than seven months of trying. Compare that to seven days for the iPhone to reach the same mark.
The night before last, a friend who wants an iPhone was bemoaning the apparent lack of support for a third party scheduling utility which he relies upon heavily, and wondering if the company will eventually make it iPhone-compatible. I pointed out that with a million iPhones already in the wild, the company would have to be crazy not to add support for the iPhone; in fact, if they have their wits about them, they won’t rest until they’ve finished writing it. You see, we iPhone users are a million-strong platform already. And while that doesn’t make any of us special or superior or cool or any of that nonsense, it does give us the kind of collective leverage that early adopters of a brand new platform don’t usually get to enjoy until much further down the road.
Now let’s be responsible about this. As Spiderman taught us, with great power comes great responsibility. So don’t go writing to a company asking for iPhone support if you don’t plan on using their products or anything silly like that. But if you do find yourself wishing that your favorite electronics store would start selling iPhone accessories, or that your favorite third-party app would build in support for the iPhone, don’t be afraid to ask them to do so. And don’t be afraid to paraphrase the old Flintstones Vitamins slogan when it comes to the iPhone user base: one million strong…and growing.
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