Apple reports selling 1 million iPhones

Days after juicing its retail channels with a price reduction, enraging Apple-ites and then apologizing, Apple Inc. announced today it had sold 1 million iPhones since the device debuted June 29.
The announcement underscored that Apple’s price cut last week indeed was aimed at broadening its market in anticipation of the coming holiday season rather than a means to help the company reach sales of a million units by the end of the third quarter.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs said it took 74 days to sell 1 million units in the United States, while it took the original iPod two years to achieve the same milestone. Such an observation must have heartened the Apple executive, who gambled that his largely PC and iPod-based business could tackle the cellular handset business by making advanced features easier and more fun to use than products from incumbent vendors.
Last week Apple also introduced the iPod Touch, which provides many similar multimedia and browsing features found on the iPhone, but uses Wi-Fi connectivity for over-the-air downloads from the company’s iTunes store. The Touch may well reflect Apple’s emphasis on a direct-to-consumer model that places network operators in the “dumb pipe” role. Apple, for instance, is selling eight times the number of iPhones at its retail stores than network partner AT&T Mobility sells, according to analysts.
The only other well-known example of such a steep sales curve came three years ago upon the launch of Motorola Inc.’s original Razr handset, which sold 750,000 units in its first 90 days on the market and went on to sell 5 million units in the first eight months it was exclusive to Cingular Wireless L.L.C.