There are now more iPhones sold than babies born in the world every day

With the release of its quarterly earnings earlier today, Apple revealed that it had sold 37.04M iPhones in fiscal Q1 of 2012. Those numbers are massive, far bigger than any other manufacturer and beyond industry estimates.

Following the announcement, there was an interesting statistic shared on Twitter by designer and author of Mobile First, Luke Wroblewski:

There are more iPhones sold per day (402k) than people born in the World per day (300k). twitter.com/#!/asymco/stat…

— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) January 24, 2012

The 37.04M iPhone figure divided out over the period of 98 days in the quarter gives us a slightly lower number at 377.9K sold every day, but it’s still higher than the world’s average birth rate which clocks in at 371K per day.

If those numbers are correct, and we believe that they are, Apple is now making iPhones at a rate that exceeds the amount of babies that humans produce on earth every day. This number is likely to be transient as the birth rate isn’t static and Apple’s first quarter normally gets a bump in sales from the Christmas shopping season which subsides in the second.

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But still, it’s a pretty staggering statistic, especially when you consider that Apple is selling every one of those devices it can make. In fact, demand for iOS devices was exceeded again in the quarter, even as Apple announced that it had sold some 315M total.

“We thought we were setting bold bets,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said about iPhone demand, “but it turns out we didn’t bet high enough.”