Apple sold 10 million iPhones in a weekend.
"Sales for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus exceeded our expectations for the launch weekend," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release. "... better ... many more ... quickly as possible (etc).”
But what does that mean?
Here are some simple ways to visualise that information...
1. First, here is the raw data:
2. Where would those iPhones stretch end-to-end?
Well, let's assume (wrongly, but Apple gives us no split figures) that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sold in roughly equal amounts. That gives us a combined length of 29.62 cm for a pair, which times five million pairs is 1,481 km. Which looks like this as the radius of a circle drawn from Central London out in all directions:
- ... it's also 4839 times the height of the Shard:
- ... but only 0.38% the distance to the Moon.
3. The area of the phones?
... combined is 215cm square. If we again take it as read that the sales were roughly split in half they had an area combined of 1075000000 cm squared.
This is an area of 10.75 hectares.
Over central London that looks like this surprisingly small square:
And as a crude Apple logo over the O2 it looks like this:
4. What about weight?
Well the combined weight of the iPhone 6 and 6 plus is 301g. Times five million pairs (again, roughly) that's 1,505,000 kg.
That's 2,150 of the largest male polar bears.
5. And in terms of Hollywood blockbusters?