Apple announced that it sold a staggering 13 million iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus on launch weekend, a three day period from Friday morning until Sunday night, September 25, 26 and 27. I know, I popped by the Boulder Apple Store on the morning of the 25th and saw the faithful lined up, waiting to get their own new iPhone:

What’s interesting about the new phone? Well, it’s another evolutionary step for the iPhone line but there are some interesting new technologies being introduced, as Apple explains:

iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus bring a powerful new dimension to iPhone’s revolutionary Multi-Touch interface with 3D Touch, which senses how deeply you press the display, letting you do essential things more quickly and simply. The new iPhones introduce Live Photos, which bring still images to life, transforming instants frozen in time into unforgettable living memories. Live Photos, 3D Touch, 12-megapixel iSight camera, 5-megapixel FaceTime HD camera with Retina Flash and more are powered by the Apple-designed A9 chip, the most advanced chip ever in a smartphone, delivering faster performance and great battery life.

All nice, of course, but let’s get back to that sales figure. 13 million units. In 72 hours, across 430 Apple Stores, 2200 AT&T Wireless stores, 2330 Verizon Stores, about 3300 Sprint Stores and 2000 T-Mobile stores where the new phones were available, that’s about 10,000 retail outlets all told. Based on the considerably smaller lines at the local AT&T and Verizon store, it was clear that a lot of people want to buy directly from Apple, so those 430 stores are probably the lion’s share of in-person purchases over the weekend.

So let’s do some math. Because you could purchase your iPhone 6s online, let’s just assume that sales were evenly distributed across those 72 hours (though I’m sure they weren’t). That’s 13,000,000 / 72 hours = 180,555 phones sold per hour. Or 3000 sold per minute.

Now let’s assume that 75% of phone sales were online through store.apple.com. And that the Apple Stores were only open 14 hours per day on launch weekend, 8am-10pm. That’d still leave 1 million phones sold per open store hour. Divided by the number of stores, that’d give us 108 phones sold per hour per store across all 10,000 outlets. But it wasn’t balanced, so let’s assume further that 75% of all iPhones were sold directly through Apple. Still with me here?

Now we’re looking at:

( (13000000*0.25) * 0.75 ) / 430 = phones sold at each retail Apple Store

That works out to 5,668 iPhones sold per Apple Store while it was open each day. Divide that by 14 and we have a working number of 404 iPhone 6s and 6s Plus units sold per hour, per store, for every hour each Apple Store was open over the weekend. Or 6.7 iPhones sold per minute, per store, per open hour.

However you slice it, that’s a whole lotta Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus units sold. I expect the Apple Store employees are ready for a holiday and congrats to Apple for another amazing product launch!

And as for me? I was handed my iPhone 6s Friday morning at 8:05am. At the AT&T Wireless store, not at the Apple Store. And it’s a very nice upgrade from the previous generation of iPhone.