In 2006 hundreds of people gathered at Apple’s Cupertino HQ to see Steve Jobs announcing the new 5GB iPod model. In five years since the presentation of the spectacular music player the sales of the new Apple device exceeded 67 million, bringing success and popularity to the company.

For many of the consumers the iPod was their first Apple product who further developed into them the care and sympathy for another line of Apple devices; iPod users started to buy also their first Macintosh. This fact became known as the “iPod Halo Effect.”

Time goes by and times have changed and it seems that the iPod history repeats itself, but this time for the recently released Apple device, the iPhone 4S. Nowadays, Apple’s main source of revenue is the iPhone; what is interestingly though is how this smartphone improved Apple’s business and brought a new boom to the company and how it happen that it trod in the steps of the iPod.

Tim Cook explained at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference how the phenomenon happened to repeat once again:

“The iPhone began to introduce Apple to literally hundreds of millions of people,” “Some that bought it, some that didn’t, others that desired it. But it introduced our brand to people who had never met Apple before.”

Though the iPhone selling didn’t work out in Eastern Europe, Africa, China, other parts of Asia and Latin America as well as in the U.S., altogether it was more able than the iPod to improve the selling. And the result is obvious: Apple is opening more and more stores all over the world, even in Brazil and Russia, and mostly in China, which is now the company’s second-largest market. No wonder the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion, has support for popular Chinese internet services.

Source: Macworld