4th largest.

It's that they have only sold one model of phone at any given time.

And in some countries, including the very lucrative and unit-crazy USA, they've been exclusive to a single carrier.

In the majority of countries there's no longer an exclusivity deal, but carriers are still selling locked subsidized handsets. The seemingly low entry price is attractive and Apple definitely need to keep this happening to be able to compete with everyone else in the traditional sales model.

Apple meanwhile has started selling them unlocked on their own as well. Huge margins, but they couldn't be number four in unit sales without subsidies. They can afford to drop the price significantly, but from a business perspective, I think they're doing what they need to be doing.

I just picked up my first iPhone the other day in fact - no subsidy, fully unlocked. It feels strange walking around with such an expensive gadget let me tell you. While I mentioned many times that it simply wasn't worth that amount of money to me, a couple of situations recently transpired where it made some sense for me to jump in now, so I did.

With the Verizon rumors getting stronger I see a lot more phones about to fly off Apple's shelves. And even more when the second Verizon model comes out supporting LTE. I doubt it will be supported in the first version. It will be interesting to see what happens to Verizon's network if the iPhone takes off there.

It is impressive, but in a way they usually sell two at a time, the current model and the older one. I know that's not exactly what you mean, but when they sell the old model for $99, that does tend to boost its sales quite a bit at the end of its run.

Still, definitely impressive any way you slice it.

Even the two (old and new) are really the same thing to a lot of us...

I remember seeing a Nokia ad one boasting of their 83 kinds of phones. I was thinking how dumb that is, since they have 3 basic kinds (cheapo, blackberryish, and iphoneish) and having been through a few of their phones, know they run towards the unspectacular. If they would just make one each of the three kinds, maybe they could offer one really good phone for each type.

Apple's making one really good model is a really good model.

Agreed, and that's pretty much always been their model, discounting the Sculley years.

The downside for awkward folks like me is that I don't like the cheap-ish, the blackberry-ish or the iphone-ish. So at least one of the other 80 Nokias is always the one I go for. For corporate purposes I know it has to be a Blackberry (as Apple seem to have no intention of making the iPhone meet security standards - the number of big companies allowing iPhones just amuses me. If they could only see what they are providing as unprotected data...ah well) if you want corporate push email, but for everything else you're screwed.

Still haven't found anything to beat the 6310i for the functions I need - hope I don't break it :-)

There's nothing as fast as that to make phone calls. After moving to Smart/Palm Phones, years ago, I gave mine to my mother, who now does not want anything else currently in the market. In years, she dropped her 6310i many times, to eventually crack the case. The phone still works, but she wants another one, just like it; so I got her a new one which, amazingly, you can still find on eBay (new, with 2 years warranty) for a crazy price (200 Euros!).

By far, my best phone. Quick in any possible way, effective in any possible way, nice looking and thin enough to forget you have it in your pocket. Battery would last 6 days in average usage. What a dream. Great reception strength, great audio quality. And the beautifully super-responsive Nokia software of those years. It felt and was very solid. Superb key response and feel. Nothing I owned or tried can compare.
Nokia made it so very right.

Not a smart phone, unfortunately. So no agenda and calendar and music player and excel and notes and all those things I can't give up now anynmore. Otherwise, that's the phone I'd be using now.

Remarkable graphic that shows how well Apple is doing:


(click through for details)

P.S. Stupid off-topic question: the png image, above, is being squished down when rendered inside this page. Is the style sheet dorking with its resolution or something?

*context-click, inspect element*, I'm seeing a "max-width:500px" being set. I'll look at raising that up a little, as it seems a bit too low for the common resolutions people run here. It's UBBThreads way of working around the old problem of a large image making every post on the page too wide.

Yes:

Which I find odd. I find that annoying too, but I don't know why they don't just let each post widen if needed. They already look completely separated as it is... (at least with the theme I'm using...)

They look that way, but they're not. They're in one big table. The correct solution is to move to DIVs, but, for whatever reason, they haven't done that.

Basically 8.0 is a major rewrite. 1-7 have just been mostly incremental updates, so the legacy table stuff has stuck around a while.