Nokia and Apple dominate in the Top 15 of the most successful mobile phones of all time, i.e. the best-selling devices from the moment of their launch until 2023: Visual Capitalist he drafted one classification ad hoc, based on the combination of a series of data extrapolated from Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance and Omdia.
Among the first two positions there is no place for modern smartphones, which appear in the ranking only in third place with the iPhone 6, and this is not surprising, given that the so-called “feature phones”, traditional phones without apps and social networks dominated consumer ratings far and wide in the early years of the cell phone boom.
Nokia and Apple on the shields
The Nokia 1100 marketed since 2003, it stands out in the rankings with 250 million units sold: weighing 96 grams, with a black and white display and removable battery, the phone was also a great success in our country.
Also the model of Nokia 1100 presented on the market in 2005, second in the Top 15, it recorded an incredible number of sales (248 million): weighing less than its predecessor (80 grams), it also has a black and white display and separate battery
The first smartphone in the ranking, in third place, is theiPhone6/6 Plus, presented for the first time at the Flint Center of Apple's Cupertino Campus in San Francisco on September 9, 2014: a total of 222 million units were sold between the two models. The great success presumably derives from the fact that for the first time Apple decided to offer larger screens compared to the 4-inch diagonal that had characterized the iPhone6's predecessors for years.
The Finnish company returns to fourth place with its Nokia 105, which has sold 200 million units worldwide. Presented in 2013 at the Mobile World Congress, the model had enormous success despite the fact that smartphones already dominated the market. It had a 348 kb RAM, a 4 Megabyte internal memory, an address book designed for a maximum of 500 contacts, an LED torch, an FM radio, a clock, a calculator, a measurement converter and a calendar.
Apple lands in fifth place with iPhone 6s/6s Plus (174 million units sold). There are few new features compared to the predecessors placed on the third step of the podium, as often happens with the S versions, i.e. a hardware update and the arrival of the new version of the operating system, at the time of the iOS 9 launch.
Sixth theiPhone 5s: launched on 13 September 2013 and marketed starting from the 20th, it has sold 165 million units worldwide: it is the first Apple smartphone to have introduced Touch ID, i.e. the fingerprint reader integrated into the physical front button.
A huge success among the public was the Nokia 3210, in seventh place with its 161 million units sold. Presented in 1999, it stood out for the innovations in the keyboard: in addition to the 10 numbers and the * and # keys, the “C” key was introduced to delete the typed text or go back in the menus, the scroll keys with arrows to the right and left and the central one renamed “Nokia Navi”, with which the user performed the function selected on the mobile phone display.
Eighth place for iPhone 7/7 Plus, with 160 million units sold worldwide since the presentation date (September 2016): it is a model in which aesthetic improvements and new photographic compartments have been introduced. Equipped with the iOS 10 operating system, they are the first Apple-branded phones to be equipped with IP67 certification against water and dust.
Apple is still in ninth place, with iPhone 11/11 Pro/11 Pro Maxwhich stand at 159 million units sold since their launch in September 2019. Apple seeks to diversify its offer, making its mobile phones available even to those who cannot afford to shell out astronomical sums: it is no coincidence that the best-selling model is the basic one (iPhone 11), the cost of which has steadily decreased in the 12 months after launch.
Closes the Top 10iPhone XR/XS/XS Max with 151 million copies sold worldwide, while to find the first Samsung (model E1100), you have to go down to 14th place.