Numeracy and iPhone sales figures
Right now I’m reading Paulos’ Innumeracy, the first section of which is spent illustrating large, abstract numbers by using everyday quantities or activities to make them real.
I’m having fun employing this technique with figures from my day-to-day business life. For example, in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009, Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones and 10.2 million iPods. I don’t know about you, but when I hear these kind of numbers, I don’t usually think too hard about what they mean beyond comparing them to last quarter’s unit sales, the sales from the same quarter last year, or perhaps the abysmal sales of Windows Mobile-based handsets.
But if you take a minute to think about it and punch a few numbers into Calculator.app, in order to sell 7.4 million iPhones in a quarter you have to sell .95 iPhones every single second of every minute of every hour of every day in that quarter.
Nearly an iPhone sold every second.
Consider the sheer logistical feat of manufacturing and selling one of anything per second. No, really, just stop and think about it. For a second. Ding! Someone, somewhere just purchased an iPhone.
Or, let’s look at it differently; if we assume that the average price to a consumer of an iPhone during that period was, say, $150 US, we come up with estimated wealth transfer of 1.11 billion dollars US from consumers to Apple and Apple’s retail and carrier partners around the world. 1.11 billion is another abstraction that most of us probably don’t ever try to conceive of as a real physical quantity. If you want to get your head around 1.11 billion, think about this: If you were presented with a pile of one-dollar bills and were to hand one to Steve Jobs every second without stopping to eat or go to bathroom or to ask Steve when the tablet is coming out, it would take you 35.2 years to finish handing him 1.11 billion of them.
It’s easy to get disconnected from these types of figures—after all, we’re drowning in them every single day. But it’s fun and a little awe-inspiring—to me, at least—to sometimes slow down, bust out a calculator, and think hard about what they really mean.
