How many iPhones had Apple sold in total by mid-2025?

How to get close to this number

Multiply annual sales by years. The product has sold in the hundreds of millions of units a year at its peak, across the years since 2007 with a ramp at the beginning. Integrating that curve gives a cumulative total in the low billions, and cumulative-sales questions almost always reduce to this integration. People often guess low because they count the owners they can picture rather than every purchase over nearly two decades.

The scale is easier to believe from the other direction: a substantial fraction of everyone on Earth with a smartphone has owned one, and most of them have owned several, because replacement cycles run a few years. Cumulative unit sales count purchases, not people, so a long-lived product accumulates a total that exceeds its user base by a wide margin.

The provenance has two layers. The company stopped reporting unit sales in 2018, so for years cumulative totals were reconstructed from revenue and average selling prices. The figure here is an official milestone instead, announced on an earnings call — but a round number is a floor rather than a count, and sales have continued since, which is why the question carries a date. The profitability claim in the explanation is softer still: plausible, widely repeated, and unverifiable from outside the company.