What Apple really means when it says it has “sold” a product ?€” Tech News and Analysis
Apple's sales figures include both direct sales and channel sales, which are devices sold to retail partners, such as Best Buy, Verizon, AT&T, Staples, Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, Radio Shack, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cosco, etc, etc, and a myriad of companies outside of the US. The device counts as sold when Apple is disconnected from financial responsibility of the device. In the example in the linked article, 37.5 million phones are reported as sold, however 11.6 million have been "sold" to retailers, not directly to customers and we have no way of knowing how many of those are in consumer hands. Now, of course we can speculate given how fast they sell out, but the fact remains that they're using the exact same method of counting "sold" units, it's just more misleading because they have their own stores to sell direct from.
Additionally, Apple never reports by product model, only by product type: ie, they report iPhones, iPads, iPods, etc and we're left to guess at the distribution, while most companies are reporting by each type of individual product. This makes it very difficult to compare sales of the 5s to the S4 -- because we're comparing 3 or more devices to 1.
Now, when they reported last September that they sold 9 million in 3 days, that was only 5s and 5c models and didn't include older models. So that's better, but still... how do we know how many of each?
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