3G iPhone’s cool million in sales

Apple’s 3G iPhone broke a million unit retail sales over the weekend, which is pretty impressive when you consider the first-generation device took 74 days to hit the one million sold mark.

While a handful of that million were bought not for handset use, but for teardown use, it’s safe to assume that the majority of those on line at Apple stores Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and still online this week, are consumers looking to play with, not pry apart the second-generation iPhone. Note the picture of Apple’s San Fran store and the lines that continued to form this morning, five days after release. EDN Senior Editor Ann Mutschler graciously took the photo this morning about an hour before the store opened as she hurried to Semicon West. (Thanks, Ann!)

Steve Jobs has stated Apple’s goal to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. Apple scored 10% of that goal in just a few days. How? Are consumers that enthralled by 3G technologies? (Do they even know why they want 3G, this summer’s tech buzzword?) Well, iSuppli today released its teardown and said that it’s not the 3G add that encouraged the mass of weekend consumers, but instead it was the 3G iPhone’s price tag with the 8-GByte model sold at a $199.

“The addition of 3G wireless capability represents an evolutionary design step for the iPhone, not a revolutionary one,” said Andrew Rassweiler, teardown services manager and principal analyst at iSuppli, in a statement. “iSuppli believes Apple aimed for a more cost-effective design for the 3G iPhone compared to the 2G, in order to lower the retail price—which will allow the company to seed adoption and to capture maximum market share now—while the company still has buzz and a perceived differentiation relative to its competitors.”

According to iSuppli’s teardown, the iPhone 3G’s use of an Infineon Technologies baseband chip that supports the HSDPA, WCDMA, and EDGE air standards, plus the integration of three separate TriQuint Semiconductor tri-band WCDMA power amplifier modules, reflects the fact that the iPhone 3G is suited for sale worldwide.

Apparently, the economy isn’t scaring off electronics consumers. Gartner this week noted strong handset sales and inferred that the semiconductor industry might not be as harshly impacted by our rising unemployment levels and gas prices than first thought.

To be true, though, and to keep Apple’s million weekend sales in perspective, Nokia sold some 115.5 million handset units in Q1 alone. So Apple isn’t exactly nipping at number one Nokia’s heels when it comes to mobile-phone market share. Nor is it nipping at Samsung’s heels, or Motorola’s heels, for that matter.

Share your thoughts on Apple’s 3G iPhone sales, the company’s 10 million sales goal, or anything else from this blog post below.

–Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News