iphone 12 vs iphone 5

(Pocket-lint) - Apple has declared its first weekend sales for the new iPhone models, showing not only how popular the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are, but how the appetite for the iPhone has grown over the last 7 years.

With 10 million new iPhones sold after the first weekend - remembering that the figure includes pre-orders which opened on 12 September - it outstrips the figures achieved for all previous models of iPhone in the same timeframe.

When you start to look back over previous opening weekend sales, there is a clear trend. More and more people are buying iPhones on the opening weekend.

The iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C hit 9 million in the same time period in 2013, so the step-up is only 1 million, but you have to also remember that the combination of both iPhone 6 smartphones will mean much greater turnover for Apple compared to the 5C sales.

It also highlights that selling two different models on the same day now doubles what Apple were selling only two years ago when the iPhone 5 when on sale. It sold, at the time, a whopping 5 million in the first 3 days in 2012.

It's when you look further back still that you can see Apple's growth. iPhone 4S sold 4 million by the end of the first weekend of availability, which was a substantial jump over the 1.7 million achieved by the iPhone 4 in 2010.

If 4 million rings a bell, that's because pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus hit 4.3 million in the first 24 hours.

The pre-orders play a big part in Apple's numbers, with the iPhone 4 selling 600,000 in 24 hours, iPhone 4S selling 1 million in 24 hours, iPhone 5 selling 2 million in 24 hours.

While we are throwing numbers at you, there are two figures that really make an impact over the last 7 years of the iPhone:

The first is that Apple state it took 74 days to sell the first 1 million iPhones in 2007. and that in the last Apple earnings report it now sells over 1 million every 3 days.

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