Apple's Secret Weapon is Energizing | Tech Superpowers
In a previous blog post from last year - Why you should care about the iPhone SDK, I talk about Xcode - Apple's secret weapon. You can read the previous article, typed up when iPhone 2.0 was released in 2008, to find out why I think the iPhone SDK is defining the future of Apple and the Mac platform.
Today's post is about tracking how that secret weapon is starting to energize. This is what I wrote in 2008, just about a year ago:
Uh, so Apple sells around 9 million Macs a year and now, around the same iPhones. Think of every Mac as not a Mac, but as a piece of equipment that runs programs running in Xcode.
Apple will sell close to 10 million iPhones in 18 months. Add to that all the iPod touches that they sell - millions.
Suddenly, in a matter of a year, the rate of growth of Xcode-enabled devices has doubled. Doubled - think about that. The conclusion is obvious: Apple's foray into the mobile space will result in double the number of programmers familiar with the fundamental coding environment for the Mac.
This weekend, Apple sold over 1 million iPhone 3GS units. In April, Apple released total numbers of iPhone and iPod touch users on a quarterly financial call: 37 million units, and that was before the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 was released. And then there's those pesky rumours about an Apple Netbook...
Now there are 50,000+ applications, thousands of app developers, and a billion downloads. 37 million mobile devices running Xcode-developed apps.
Compare that to last year's numbers. Think of that in terms of Xcode and the potential for Mac developers. The rate of growth is staggering.
Do the math. That's a lot of development momentum which, properly targeted, could mean huge things for the Mac community.
