Apple sells its billionth iPhone, year-over-year decline be damned

Enlarge / Over one billion of these things have been sold. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has sold fewer iPhones in the last two quarters than it did last year, but it's still selling plenty of them. Apple CEO Tim Cook proclaimed today that the company has sold one billion iPhones since the launch of the original device back in 2007.

Recent slump aside, the iPhone's astronomical growth rate means that nearly half of those iPhones have been sold within the last two years; about 472 million of those phones were sold between Q3 of 2014 and Q3 of 2016.

For his part, Cook expects the iPhone's slump to be temporary, and he has blamed the year-over-year drop on the abnormally high number of upgraders who bought an iPhone 6 after it came out-the 6 and 6 Plus were Apple's first large-screened phones and there was a lot of pent-up demand. New iPhones (possibly without headphone jacks) are due in the fall, and we'll need to wait until then to see if new models can restart the phone's steady growth.

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