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Apple sells its billionth iPhone

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Apple on Wednesday announced that it has sold its billionth iPhone. The original iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007.

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The news, which comes a day after the Cupertino giant announced its quarterly earnings for the third quarter of fiscal year 2016. In its latest quarter, Apple sold 40.4 million iPhone devices.

Hitting a milestone of 1 billion phones is impressive, especially when one considers that Apple sold its 500 millionth iPhone in March 2014. It sold its 700 millionth iPhone in March 2015. 

Apple's sales rate in iPhones has undoubtedly been helped by the increase in iPhone sales in crucial markets, such as China.

In January, Apple announced that it had more than 1 billion active devices across all of its platforms (so that includes iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac). In contrast, Google first announced its billion active users figure in June 2014.

On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evans wrote an interesting blog post comparing the active device figures for the two dominant mobile platforms, iOS and Android. Evans' research indicates that there are 630 million active iPhone devices in the world, compared with about 1.3 to 1.4 billion phones running the Android version of Google.

Still, we can't think of any other product line — from any single vendor — that has managed to sell 1 billion units in such a short period of time.

Apple is expected to unveil its next iPhone devices in September.