Apple announced they sold 1 million iPhones over the opening weekend. This is a staggering number when you think about.

“iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.”

This number is especially staggering considering how little changed between last year’s iPhone and this year’s 3G model. Besides the 3G capability, GPS functionality, and a slightly larger Hard drive, it was hardly a significant upgrade. Of course, you may be hearing a slight sarcasm in that line. This is because for some people, that may seem insignificant. But for those who have owned the first generation iPhone for over a year, you would know that all of these additions are game-changing.

Apple also announced that 10 million applications were downloaded over the last weekend. This number seems almost disappointing to me. There is no question, that most everyone who purchased a new iPhone tried to download at least 1 application from the new iTunes App Store. But throw in the millions of first gen iPhone users who had a device ready to upgrade to iPhone 2.0 software and you can see the possible impact the server issue had on downloads.

Had everyone been able to activate or upgrade their iPhones over the weekend that wanted to, I would argue that downloaded apps number would have been closer to 25 million.

[Via Yahoo Finance]