iOS is big
Those cheeky chappies at Tap! magazine have been looking at the numbers surrounding iOS, and they’re big: 650,000 apps, 75 per cent of parents sharing app-enabled devices with kids, a grand a second raked in by Apple through the App Store, and, apparently, enough iPhones and iPads have been sold to make a Saturn-like ring around Earth. I also chuckled on reading Tap!’s extrapolation regarding the number of apps:
It would take you a week just to read the names of all the apps on the store
That’s how I feel time’s passing when trawling through insanely long RSS feeds, looking for apps to review.
Anyway, the spiffy graphic is below (Control/right-click and select the relevant option to view in big-o-vision) and Tap! the app is available now from the App Store. It’s very good.
The numbers are all splendid, but that bit about half of US is completely wrong, unless you melted the glass and poured it out really really thinly.
Let’s assume there are a US billion (1,000,000,000) iOS devices (a huge overestimate, but only as much as rounding up to the next power of ten, which is amazing), and each has a screen of a meter square (again, a huge over estimate, but it makes the numbers easy).
You need 1 million of those devices to cover a square kilometre (1,000 x 1,000 = 1,000,000). So, with a billion devices you can cover 1,000 square kilometres. sort(1000) is about 33, so you end up with iOS devices covering about 33km x 33km. That’s a big patch of shiny glass, but it doesn’t really rate on “glazing the US” stakes too highly.
Sorry to come out of the closet as being hugely anal about numbers, but it matter to me! And the “fact” is out by a good few orders of magnitude.
🙂