8 Million iPhones Manufactured, and Counting

A joint project between the Apple Finance Board (AFB) and Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board has been collecting the IMEI numbers from as many iPhone 3Gs as possible, placing the results in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

By tracking the sequence of the IMEIs, the project now says that, with a fair degree of confidence, it can report that as of the end of August Apple had manufactured at least 5,649,000 iPhone 3Gs. When you add the 2.4 million first-generation iPhones Apple reported it had sold in the first six months of 2008, that means that Apple has manufactured more than 8 million iPhones this year.

Note: manufactured, not necessarily sold.

Still, this means Apple is on track to build the 10 million iPhones it' said several times it would sell by the end of this year. And just watching the first weekend sales, and the continued frenzy over the iPhone (though perhaps not in Europe, and despite continuing 3G issues), it seems obvious Apple should achieve this goal well in advance of the end of the year.

Watch the video, from 2007 Macworld, where Jobs made that statement:

[TechnologyExpert]