Apple has already reached its goal of selling 10m iPhones this year, if some obsessive monitoring by Apple heads is to be believed. A London investor called Tommo_UK started asking for people to post the serial numbers of the phone and the date they bought it so that he could decipher how many phones Apple is distributing.
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Two months on, other posters on the Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board have helped catalogue 150 serial numbers - and estimate that Apple has made more than 9m handsets explains CNN. If 1.5m of those are sitting around unsold, that still means 7.6m phones have been shifted.
"Why is 7.6 million significant? Because coming into its fourth quarter, Apple had already sold 2.42 million first-generation iPhones. So if Tommo_UK's IMEI data can be trusted and if Zaky and Muller's analysis is correct, Apple has reached its oft-stated goal of selling at least 10 million iPhones in 2008 with three months to spare."
At least it's not all bad for Apple, then. No word on whether it might sue CNN iReport just yet...
