Apple sold approximately 38 million iPhones in the first quarter, an 8% increase over what it sold in the same quarter a year ago, an analyst said today.
Brian Marshall of the ISI Group said today he was sticking with his estimate of 38 million iPhones for the January-March quarter.
Others, including Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets and Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, have placed their bets on lower numbers -- 35 million and 35.5 million, respectively -- for the quarter that ended March 31, flat or just 1% above last year's number.
The experts, however, are looking ahead more than they're revising recent history.
Marshall, for example, predicted that Apple will release its next iPhone -- which many have been tagging as the "iPhone 5S" in a nod to previous Apple naming conventions -- in late June or early July. White has the same timetable in mind.
That would be a departure from the last two iterations of the smartphone -- the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 -- which went on sale in October 2011 and September 2012, respectively.
But the return of an iPhone launch to summer, a schedule last used in 2010 for the iPhone 4, faces at least one obstacle: Apple has not yet released a preview of its next iOS SDK (software development kit) to app makers.
In the two most-recent years when Apple has launched a new iPhone in June, it seeded developers with a new SDK several months in advance.
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