And you call *this* a bad Apple?!

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 at 11am
By John Friedman

Apple’s numbers are in the news today, but this time the newsworthiness is not stemming from the numbers being great, but, rather, from the numbers falling short of the fantastic sorts of numbers people have come to expect.

Personally, I still find them fantastic, in the sense of having somewhat of a fantasy quality to them. After all, what does it mean to sell $35 billion worth of stuff and bits and such in the course of 90 days?  That’s about — what? — $3 billion a week or some $400 million a day.  Roughly speaking.

And what does it mean to sell 26 million iPhones in the quarter?  Here’s what AAPL missing its quarterly numbers looks like, at the iPhone level:

 Actual Results
   

 =

26.000

   Millions of iPhones sold

 ÷

7.776

 Millions of seconds in 2012 Q2 **

 

  

 =

3.344

  Actual iPhones sold per second
in 2012 Q2

 

  
 Estimates Beforehand

 =

29.000

 Millions of iPhones (consensus estimate beforehand)

 ÷

7.776

 Millions of seconds in 2012 Q2

 =

3.729

  Earlier consensus estimate of iPhones
that would be sold per second in 2012 Q2

 

  

 

  
** Seconds in the Quarter

 

  

 =

90

 Days in 2012 Q2

 x

24

 Hours per day

 x

60

 Minutes per hour

 x

60

 Seconds per minute

 

  

 =

 7,776,000   Seconds in 2012 Q2

Yup, they sold three-and-a-third iPhones every second of every day, rather than the three-and-three-quarters folks ahead of time had expected.  Those are pretty mind-blowing numbers aren’t they?

Looking at the numbers on a daily basis rather than on a second-by-second basis, the numbers are also mind-blowing, but, to me anyway, in a different way.  Here the figures are that Apple sold about 289 thousand iPhones  per day, while The Street was looking for it to sell roughly 322k iPhones per day.  Think about the oh-the-humanity simply involved in fulfilling that task.  From the person working on the machine to make the part that goes into the iPhone, all the way to the person handing the iPhone off to the user, 289 thousand times each day, weekends and holidays included.

Folks, I think about numbers a lot, and I also think about scale a lot — and the scale of numbers is one of my all-time favorite topics.

Folks, these are some mighty big numbers.

 

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