Image Source: Engadget

The picture above, courtesy of Engadget, shows people still lining up at New York’s Fifth Avenue store to get their hands on a new iPhone 3G this morning.  As good an image as any to sum up a big first weekend for the second gen iPhone – and Apple has announced this morning that it was pretty damn good weekend in terms of sales:

Apple® today announced it sold its one millionth iPhone™ 3G on Sunday, just three days after its launch on Friday, July 11.

“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.”

I’ve seen a slew of reports on the web about the one million box-office hit type numbers, including many that are wondering whether that really is an impressive number for Apple or not.  In particular, The Boy Genius Report has a good post up asking whether this is really good or bad.

I never keep up very well with all the finance / analysis side of these things, but it does seem valid to question how big a deal 1 million is this year – with 21 countries involved in the launch and a 12-hour head start over the V1 2007 launch time (8:00am start vs. 6:00pm) – as compared to 700,000 on last year’s first weekend in the US alone.

What are your impressions?  Is this year’s launch an even bigger hit?

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