Amazing Stats from Apple Q3 Earnings Prove Yet Again We're In A Post-PC Era

Apple's stock price could bounce around anywhere between $300 and $1,000 over the next several weeks. I really have no idea. What I am certain, though, is that Apple's Q3 earnings results announced Wednesday show Cupertino again blazing the trail into the mobile era.

Here's the stats that especially blew me away:

1) Apple shipped 46.9 million iPhones and iPads, versus 4 million Macs. That's nearly 12x more mobile devices than PCs.

2) If we count tablets as full computers, as a growing number of analyst firms are doing, than Apple shipped 15.8 million computers in the slow post-Christmas quarter. That would put it ahead of the global PC market leader, HP. Hewlett-Packard shipped about 15.3 million PCs in calendar Q1, according to Gartner Inc. On the strength of Macs alone, Apple still ranked 3rd in the U.S., said Gartner.

3) Apple had $110 billion in cash at March 31st. That's enough to buy the 5 largest PC makers outright, and still have $13 billion left over.

(And remember, for most of these companies, PCs are still only a fraction of their overall business. HP is probably the most extreme case - PCs only bring in about a fourth of its overall revenue.)

4) Apple has sold 67 million iPads in the last 2 years. It took Apple 24 years to sell that many Macs. In other words, it took Apple 12x the time to sell as many computers as it did tablets.

5) We can also estimate how many iPhones and iPod Touches that Apple has sold altogether in their nearly 5-year history. That's based on 4 things:

- An Apple legal filing from March 2011, when it revealed it had sold 19 million iPads, 108 million iPhones and 60 million iPod Touches;

- Apple's shipment breakdowns in the last 4 quarters;

- CEO Tim Cook's statement Tuesday that Apple now had 365 million iOS mobile devices in use today;

- CFO Peter Oppenheimer's statement that iPod Touches "continue" to make up slightly more than half of all iPod sales. I'll assume that they comprise about 56%.

Based on that, I calculate that Apple has to date sold nearly 81 million iPod Touches and 218 million iPhones. See my table below (right-click to view and save):

And here I am trying to do my best Asymco imitation:

And finally...

6) Apple now has 600,000 apps in its App Store (200,000 specifically for iPad). That's 4.5x greater than the number of PC software titles (128,959) in Amazon.com's software section, which includes Windows, Mac and Linux.

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