Sales of Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch now equal the annual sales of devices running Microsoft’s Windows platform.
The new milestone for Apple was noted this week by analyst Benedict Evans, culled from data provided by Gartner, Apple, and a16z. It shows that while annual Windows PC sales have fluctuated around the 300 million mark since 2008, iOS devices have continued their meteoric rise.
While iPad and iPod touch sales have actually shrank in recent years, tremendous sales growth on the iPhone’s part has carried the iOS platform sales higher and higher.
While the total install base of Windows machines (1.5 billion), remains higher than the iOS installed base, PCs have a much longer upgrade cycle than iOS devices, leading to the annual sales increase for the mobile devices.
It should be noted that annual sales of Android devices – which are manufactured by everyone and their brother, except for the pizza place on the corner – surpassed that of Windows PCs in March of 2012. However, iOS devices come from one manufacturer, and one only, Apple. Apple revealed in January that it shipped its one-billionth iOS device during the 2014 holiday season.
