Apple ships 10 Million iPhones, gets additional buzz for it

It looks like Apple will blow past its goal of 10M iPhones for 2008 by quite a large margin. The information comes from MacObserver who tracked the iPhones IMEI numbers (a unique ID for phones). To be precise, this means that Apple has manufactured 10 million phones, but it’s fair to say that they probably don’t have a million devices sitting in a storage area in Taiwan. That’s why we think that it is very likely that Apple will crush its estimate. It’s quite an extraordinary achievement that other phone makers envy, but I think that this is also an excellent expectation management technique, as the internal goal (and forecast) was probably even more ambitious than 10M from the start. [via mobilewhack]