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Filed under: Business, Apple

iPhone sales outpacing original ipod but still look short

One needs only to turn to YouTube and Wikipedia to discover the realities behind the hype of the iPhone, which, deserved or not, is still hype. Today, eWeek reported that Apple's much-vaunted cellular phone has passed one million retail units sold. eWeek points out (in what is certainly a tip of the hat to Apple's press release wording) that this milestone was reached ahead of schedule. Sounds great, especially considering the thing's only been available for a few months.

But when the onion is peeled back (and the way-back machine set for January of this year), the hype seems a little less exciting. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January, he said Apple's goal was to ship 10 million iPhones by the end of the year 2008. In order to achieve this feat now, he needs retail to sell 9 million units in 4 16 months. Granted, the holiday season is coming up, and the price of the device just dropped substantially, but with only a single carrier as a service partner, the 10 million mark seems like a very tall order indeed.

Still, the iPhone has been a relative success, especially when you consider it took the first two iPod generations nearly two years just to cross the million unit market, something iPhone has done in just a little under three months. We know the iPod was in a brand new market, and in all honesty was probably more revolutionary than the iPhone. At the time of its introduction, digital music storage was a foreign concept to most consumers, whereas cell phones are already carried by a majority of the adult population in North America.

So what do you think? Now that we've seen some intermediate sales numbers, is Apple going to hit the 10 million mark by year's end?
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