Apple Smashes Through iPhone Sales Records Once Again, Sold 20.34M Last Quarter (As iPods Plummet)

Another quarter down, another 20.34 million iPhones sold. Straight off of their Q3 earning report, Apple is reporting a record number of iPhones sold yet again.

For comparison: Apple pushed roughly 18.65M iPhones in Q2’11 and 16.24M in Q1’11, and it’s far more than double the 8.39M iPhones they pushed in this same quarter last year. Insanity.

For the numbers nerds out there, here are Apple’s iPhone sales numbers for the past many quarters:

Q4 2008: 6.9m

Q1 2009: 4.4M (down -37% from the quarter prior)
Q2 2009: 3.8M (down -13%)
Q3 2009: 5.2M (up 37%)
Q4 2009: 7.36M (up 41%)

Q1 2010: 8.737M (up 19%)
Q2 2010: 8.752M (up <1%)
Q3 2010: 8.39M (down -4%)
Q4 2010: 14.1M (up 68%)

Q1 2011: 16.24M (up 15%)
Q2 2011: 18.65M (up 15%)
Q3 2011: 20.34M (up 9%)

Sadly: as the iPhone soars, the iPod Touch continues to fizzle. After plunking from 19.4M iPods sold in Q1 2011 (why so many? One word: Christmas. Fiscal Q1 ends a day after.) to 9M in Q2, the iPod line sold just 7.5M units in Q3.

Oh, and for anyone looking to compare this with Android’s 550,000 activations per day: this breaks down to around 223,000 iPhones per day. Add in the 9.25M iPads sold, and that jumps up to 325,000 iOS devices per day. We can’t count iPod Touches as Apple lumps all iPod sales (including iPod Classis and Nanos) together into one category — but even without them, these numbers are ridiculous. Remember, this is one manufacturer, with but a handful of models. Ridiculous.

Update: Tim Cook just stated that they sold “over 33 million iOS devices” in Q3, which helps to fill in some gaps left by the aforementioned lack of iPod Touch-specific numbers. At that total, Apple is selling a rough average of 363,000 iOS devices per day.

Find our main coverage of the Apple Q3 earnings call over here.