blog.s11n.net

15 Billion? Apple is lying out its applehole…

Hello, all!

Some of you might know that i absolutely despise Apple (the company). i’ve boycotted them actively since around 1994 and i will continue to do so until (at the very least) other companies are allowed to build Apple hardware clones (without paying exuberant licensing fees to Apple, that is).

i don’t allow Apple products in my flat (leave them at the door or don’t come in!) and i refuse to lay my hands on them (except once, i must ashamedly admit, to compare an iPhone’s weight against my mobile phone’s). i am so strongly against Apple that i would not hesitate to quit my job if i was told that i had to work on an Apple-based project.

The list of reasons i boycott Apple is about as long as my hair (i.e. it stretches from my head to below my belt), but i’m not here today to talk about that list. Today i’m here to show that Apple believes that it can magically pull impossible numbers from its butt and get away with marketing them as truths.

Let’s have a little lesson in math…

According to this post (and others like it):

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9OB0A280.htm

Apple’s App Store has reported 15 billion sales/downloads. Apple has sold, according to that same article, some 200 million devices worldwide which could be used for such sales.

Now do the math: 15b/200m = 75 apps per device on average. And its an average of roughly 2 apps per person on the planet, despite the fact that only a very small percentage of human beings own an Apple iProduct (approximately 1 in 3500 people worldwide, if we can believe the 200m number from Apple and a current worldwide population of 7b).

While there might be a small handful of people who actually buy that many apps for their iDevice (e.g. for product reviews and whatnot), there is no way in hell which Apple can convince me that the average Apple user is buying 75 applications from the App Store. (But the Apple zombies will certainly find a way to justify it, as that’s what they instinctively do every time they swallow what Apple places in front of them.)

The only ways, in my opinion, which these numbers could be explained are:

1. They’re fictional. Some finance guy/gal simply punched in the number in a spreadsheet program (or otherwise made it up).
2. Apple (or one of its 200m zombies) uses bots whose sole purpose is to just keep downloading apps over and over again to increase the official download counts. (Hell, there might be such bots built in to every iProduct, for all we know.)
3. There was an integer underflow in their download counter.

:-P