Why Apple's iPhone sales aren't really that RIMarkable

Continued...Secondly, in the markets that the iPhone was already covering, there was significant pent-up demand. The iPhone 3G was announced at the beginning of June, which almost certainly means that sales dried up to nothing for a month while consumers waited for the new model. Effectively, this means Apple has managed to squeeze four months of sales into a single quarter's results - a neat trick, but one which it can't do in every quarter.

This goes part of the way to explaining one of the points brought up by Steve Jobs on the conference call it held to announce its results. According to Jobs, iPhones outsold Blackberry by quite a significant number over the quarter. Here's what Steve Jobs said, in full:

In their most recent quarter, Research in Motion, or RIM, reported selling 6.1 million BlackBerry devices. Compared to our most recent quarter sales of 6.9 million iPhones, Apple outsold RIM last quarter and this is a milestone for us. RIM is a good company that makes good products and so it is surprising that after only 15 months in the market, we could outsell them in any quarter.

There are a couple of points which are worth making. As Joe Wilcox first pointed out, RIM's quarter and Apple's quarter don't cover the same period – Apple's ends 27th September, RIM's 30th August – which means that you can't really make a like-with-like comparison here. Continued...