First 3 days: New iPhone unit sales top 4 million

Josh Miller

Apple sold more than 4 million units of the new iPhone 4S model in three days, a rate that's more than twice as fast as the previous model launched last year. By comparison, when Apple launched the iPhone 4 last year, it sold 1.7 million in the first three days.

It's always hard to read much into early data, but anecdotal evidence suggests that a fair number of iPhone 4S shoppers are dumping their old smartphones and moving to Apple. (See this Reuters piece on the topic.)

Apple and its phone company partners started selling the iPhone 4S on Friday in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Britain. That's two more launch countries than last year. There are also more phone companies selling the phone. In the U.S., Sprint Nextel Corp. is the new carrier.

But the flip side of Apple's serendipity is the recent run of troubles plaguing Research in Motion, whose customers last week suffered through nearly three days of outages across the world. As ZDNet noted in a piece this morning, the service disruption damaged RIM's reputation with its most important audience: CTOs, CIOs and IT departments. In a research note, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek cautioned that the outage caused harm to the brand's image. "In our view," he wrote, "this opens the door to competitors as corporate CTOs and IT departments may now be more open to explore other options besides the BlackBerry standard."

[thoughtxchange2]

Wow- that is an insane number of phones. I think the new Siri really makes the phone- all the other stuff is nice but Siri is truly pretty amazing. I was one of the first to get the old Siri and it made it onto the first page of my apps since it was so useful. The new version is in a totally different class. I see so much more being done with this technology in the future. Think of having access to the IBM Watson system through Siri. That would be a true game changer again. You really could ask any question and get a good answer- Jeopardy style. Nice job Apple- love the innovation you guys bring to the table. Please keep it up.

[skithebumps]

Four million iPhones! I wonder what Siri has to say about that.