Gadgetory

it has been a while it's been one week you've been going so I've been thinking a lot about the iPhone since the last video I put up presented a couple of different viewpoints on what this phone represents this iPhone 8 and eventually the iPhone 10 and the significance of the iPhone as a product and Apple the company as a whole they've both been a significant part of the rise of this channel my channel and the rise of tech videos on YouTube so I've been thinking a lot about the iPhone in general as a product now taking me back to that original iPhone Apple says is the next big thing now I doubt very many people would argue the fact that the iPhone brand has had a substantial impact not just on YouTube in channels like mine but on the world as a whole now what might surprise a lot of you is that the initial iPhone didn't actually sell that well I don't think people knew if they wanted it or not if they needed it or not 14 million units now that number pales in comparison to the eventual sales figure for the most popular version of the iPhone ever the iPhone 6 and 6-plus Apple sold around 200 million of those so you can see how that business scaled from the original iPhone to the most popular version when you clicked on this video you saw the title you saw this outrageous claim this idea that the iPhone might just be the most successful product ever ever well I put something like this on my Twitter recently and my goodness did people fire back with their opinions of what the most successful products were now when we talk about success we're not talking strictly economically we're probably talking mostly economically but we're also talking the number of units sold the number of units in existence the number of units that are still being used to this day in other words the durability of the product because the next question it tends to come up consumable you start to mention things like coca-cola and the Big Mac where your dollar gets a break every these things that you're meant to have a lot of frequently and then they disappear what about Kleenex dominating more for your money and colored do it's hard to go anywhere and not see a box of Kleenex but again it's a cheap box sure over the course of your life you buy a lot of it but how much do you buy a minute do you buy a thousand dollars a year worth of it what about coca-cola those are about a buck apiece you get a thousand of those so here's the thing when you combine the frequency at which you buy a product the lifespan of that product and how often you upgrade it and the overall economic investment in that product you land on things like this on these devices that frequently change out for us there are very few things in your life that you spend the kind of money that you spend on your new phone Apple specifically has dominated the luxury segment the average price of an iPhone sold including older models at retail is just under $700 per unit now to put that in perspective the average sale price of a galaxy device is around $250 now that's because Samsung retails less expensive Galaxy devices and elsewhere in the world and they sell Wow this is why when you look at current market share figures you see Apple has dipped down to number three but when we talk about successful products in general we're not talking about last month we're talking about overall now the iPhone has been around a while in smartphone terms what is it like nine years but that's still relatively short when you compare it to the leaders in other market segments so Horus dead you who wrote this article which captured my attention where he lists off the most successful products by category okay here we go car bought the VW Beetle that's sold 21.5 million units now cars are interesting because they're expensive so that's a lot of transactional revenue that's a lot of money turning over but even then it's only 21 million units when you scan all the way down to the bottom two mobile phone you can see that the iPhone has passed one billion units in existence 1 billion car brand it doesn't mean like Ford Mazda Chevy a particular model over the years not one version of that model Toyota Corolla wins out their 43 million units at the time of this article of course that figures a little bit higher now how about music album Thriller by Michael Jackson 70 million copies vehicle overall the Honda Super Cub 87 million units that's a little a little bike which apparently took over the world I was unaware of book title Lord of the Rings 150 million copies the Rubik's Cube sold 350 million units and this got me thinking about what about all those knockoffs probably an even bigger number now this is where things get really interesting to me is when we talk about game consoles PlayStation as a product one two three four and the various versions in between has sold close to 400 million units almost half of the number of iPhones that are out there but with a Playstation it's kind of useless without software and I know you're gonna bring up the idea of the App Store on the iPhone but the iPhone is functional even without downloading third-party apps a PlayStation without games the expectation is that you will buy expensive software for it so if you were to tally up those 400 million Playstations plus the average number of games to go along with it now you have a compelling argument PlayStation might be the second most successful product ever now things get even more complicated when you head over to the Wikipedia page of the best-selling phones ever because at the top you'll see it's dominated by a company you rarely hear about anymore Nokia these guys occupy 1 2 3 4 5 6 at least 7 of the top 10 spots with very similar models the 1100 and 1110 those bar-style phones which all of you have seen and each one of those models sold 250 million units now smartphones don't appear until number 3 where you have that iPhone 6 and 6-plus that I mentioned earlier in 2014 it's highly unlikely that these devices occupying the top spots from Nokia are still in use today because they got sideswiped by the new idea by the touchscreen smartphone by the computer in your pocket nonetheless they're still at the top i OS devices will sometime shortly pass a trillion dollars in revenue a trillion dollars worth of iOS devices just out there broken down into individual units we're talking about a billion iPhones either in people's hands I'm sure some of them are in landfills Lou what about Android you tell us you're using Android you like Android Android is outselling iPhone that is where the growth in the marketplace is happening they have a far greater breadth of product offerings that's one of the advantages of Android now if we were comparing Android devices completely against Apple devices of course we'd have a huge number but Android in and of itself is not a product it's a license the top Samsung device on this list is not a galaxy phone at all it's the e 1100 of which there were a hundred and fifty million units sold and that was a bar-style phone the top galaxy device is the s4 which sold around 80 million units in other words not even half of what the iPhone 6 and 6-plus sold but even if you were to take all of the Galaxy devices the best-selling Galaxy devices and put them against this one if you added up everything on this page you still don't get to the iPhones figure now granted if we're looking at this thing as a race of course Samsung is catching up rapidly and Apple continues to dwindle as a percentage of overall worldwide sales but when we talk about a successful product we're talking about the lifespan as a whole and that's why the other side of the conversation gets interesting with the coca-cola's of the world now for those of you that are gonna be down in the comments talking about bottled water oil and coffee but here's the thing those things in and of themselves are not unique products and you might say what about cars they're so expensive it's not a fair comparison well none of this is a fair comparison obviously now when it comes to this conversation about the success of the iPhone in general Apple has one kind of trick up its sleeve they call everything iPhone every series of iPhone is iPhone even when there's an older model last year's model that becomes the budget model even though it's usually not so budget for the following year iPhone five six seven eight I see these various versions are essentially just continuations of the previous version being sold and so because of that when you add them all up they become part of this product part of this billion figure and now that brings us to the more abstract part of this conversation maybe we're not just talking about success in a strictly economic sense maybe let's also look at it from another angle a relevancy angle there's one thing you do every single day of your life you reach for your smartphone or you have it in your pocket companies like uber and Google and tinder that was spawned of this ability to immediately access the web earlier today we're watching music videos from the 90s and you notice that people in the street they're not staring down crouched over a device so the implications here with this particular product massive behavioral changes that now exist amongst society as a consequence of access to one of these things what about the camera the fact that everyone is now carrying one what does that mean oh well it means that when some sort of injustice happens you can guarantee it's gonna be recorded and uploaded whether you're a fan of Apple or not the implications are massive the numbers are massive whether or not you think it's the most successful product ever might have to do with your interpretation of success and product it's very difficult to argue the dominance of the iPhone to this point I personally think you can make a really good case for the iPhone as the most successful product ever but even if the iPhone is the most successful product ever I don't think it's gonna stay that way all the data we're looking at right now shows a lot of manufacturers coming up quickly and closing that gap on overall sales figures for all time maybe we're on the tail end maybe the significance of the iPhone is diminishing and maybe this iPhone eight right here is evidence of that they're certainly not gonna sell zero of them but I don't think they'll ever have the market dominance that they once did this episode of unbox the P has been brought to you by audible this of course is your place to find all the audiobooks you could ever want including one that I've been listening to recently an effective way to listen to books rather than have to read them I know myself I like to do it in the car if you have a long commute why sit there in traffic bumper-to-bumper without learning you could be learning something I mean I like to listen to non-fiction stuff but hey maybe if you like fiction you could uh you could float off into some faraway land instead of just being stuck in gridlock now right now I'm listening to the Steve Jobs book from Walter Isaacson and I think that ties in well to this video right here if you're interested in some of the early stage development of that original iPhone that I talked about earlier you can hear a lot of the backstory in this particular biography and the cool part here is you can try it out for free using the link in the description or heading over to audible.com slash unbox you get a 30-day free trial and you get to download one book that you can keep regardless even if you cancel your membership that book is yours on the house you get to keep it listen to some books because you're uncle Lou told you to