The Apple Blog

You make a good point, joechung, and I've been trying to find the related statistics. This is what I've been able to come up with so far:

Apple had 14% of the US retail PC market in Feb. 2008 -

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/17/apple_snags_14_percent_of_us_based_pc_retail_sales_in_february.html

This article claims the number was 8.7% in the 2nd quarter of 2009 -

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/07/15/single_digit_growth_boosts_apples_share_of_us_pc_market_to_8_7.html

According to this article on theappleblog.com, Apple has 4% of the global PC market as of July 2009 -

http://theappleblog.com/2009/07/25/does-apple-have-a-91-percent-share-of-the-high-end/

If anyone has more, I'd be very curious to see them (especially the ratio of sub-$1000 retail PC sales to $1000+ retail PC sales).

I totally understand. In the flurry of it all we've all forgotten what you remembered: Apple never said anything to the point of "No SDK. Ever."

Aside from Jobs' WWDC 2007 address there were rumors and signals that "web was all you're gonna get"[1][2], but obviously they planned an SDK that eventually was announced 9 months after the reveal. Or developer pressure convinced the staff to polish the internal tools and APIs for public use? I'm kind of sad that with the new secretive Apple, we'll never know the full story behind the scenes for a long long time to come.

[1] http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-coverage/

[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-will-remain-web-based-for-the-foreseeable-future.ars

I just happened to be researching this. While I haven't done it myself, the consensus seems to be that the prepaid AT&T "Go Phone" is the best solution for low cost data in the US without a contract. The data itself is very expensive by global standards ($20/100MB) but the entry cost is very low presuming you already have a compatible GSM device. But if you're mostly playing around in Silicon Valley, you can probably arrange to have most of your data delivered by unmetered WiFi.

This link has good information:
http://forum.brighthand.com/smartphones/268235-payg-dataplan-can-work.html

This is iPhone specific, but might help too:
http://theappleblog.com/2010/07/26/how-to-give-your-old-iphone-new-life-with-prepaid-data-and-minutes/

Well, I'll reply to myself.

From the 1996 (when the first PalmOS device came out) to 2003, they sold over 30.1 million PalmOS devices, of which 22 millions from the company itself (the rest from clones). [1]

In comparison Apple released the first iOS device in 2007. Two years later (at the 2009 WWDC) they announced over 40 millions iOS devices. In fact _just_ in 2009 Apple sold over 42 million such devices.

That should give a bit of a scale.

[1] http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/palmfaq.txt

[2] http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling-iphone/

At the risk of repeating myself: Apple has apparently sold 35 million iPod Touches in a little over two years:

http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling...

Sales are apparently up 55% year-over-year.

These devices do exactly what the iPad does, only with a much smaller screen, far fewer networking options, and (if rumors are to be believed) slower performance.

These numbers are trying to tell us something. Perhaps we should listen?