what is the iPhone app store doing that Palm didn't do before? Moving units. It's annoyingly difficult to pull definitive PDA sales numbers for all time, but

what is the iPhone app store doing that Palm didn't do before? Moving units. It's annoyingly difficult to pull definitive PDA sales numbers for all time, but this article: http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/08/03/pda-sales-set-for-record-year/ http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/08/03/pda-sales-set-for-... says that annual PDA sales peaked at 13.2 million in 2001, then slid for several years, then picked up again. That's all things called a "PDA", which obviously includes a bunch of Blackberries, Windows CE gadgets, etc. Palm had only 17% market share in 2005. So assume that Palm was moving about 20% of those 13.2M units in 2001. That's 2.64 million. Round it up to 3 million units per year. [1] Apple moved 8.75 million iPhones and nearly 11 million iPods (many of which were iPod Touch units) last quarter: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/once-again-apple-has-its-best-non-holiday-quarter-ever/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/once-again-apple-has-its-be... Which is to say: Apple is selling iPhone OS hardware at a rate at least 11 times larger, and probably more than 20 times larger, than Palm ever sold PDAs. (And this is just counting Apple products. The OP's point about App Stores applies to Android as well. iPhone plus Android equals Palm times, say, fifty.) This is the OP's point: Palm may have pioneered the market and sold a bunch of software, but Apple, and its Android-based follow-on products, have grown the market by orders of magnitude. --- [1] On the one hand, the fact that my lame Google-searched sales stats stop in 2005 is a problem. Palm sold stuff after 2005. On the other hand, my impression was that Palm was also becoming a phone company around that time. Anyone with better data is welcome to show it.