Well, iDay has come and gone and we’re still waiting for some solid numbers on how many phones were sold, which may be a while in coming if Apple’s history is to be taken into account. Still it might be fun to play around with some numbers to get a feel for just how many iPhones were sold over the weekend and put things into scale for the long haul.

Here’s what we know:

• Apple has about 164 brick and mortar stores in the U.S. I won’t count Store-in-a-Stores or AT&T outlets.
• News reports estimate that each store had about 300 people waiting in line before 6 p.m. on Friday (June 29). I know the stores we covered Friday had that many, so it’s a good number to start with.
• More 8 GB iPhone were sold than 4 gig according news reports. Some store were out of 8 gig models and still had 4 gig models to sell.

Here’s some assumptions:

• From my own observations I would conservatively estimate that at least 3x the number of people in line on Friday, June 29, bought iPhones over the weekend in Apple Stores. That puts the number of iPhone sold in each Apple store from Friday, June 29 to Sunday, July 1 at about 900. Again, that’s conservative.
• I’m going to estimate that 2 out of every 5 iPhones sold were of the 4 gig variety. That makes the average iPhone cost about $559.
• The initial 300 got through the lines in about an hour. This is just from my observations.

OK, from here we can do some funky math and learn that about 49,500 people bought an iPhone from Apple Stores in the first hour after it was released. 148,500 bought iPhones over the weekend from Apple stores. Again, this is a very conservative estimate.

At $559 per phone Apple grossed $83,011,500. Not bad for just one item over less than 3 days.

Some analysts are estimating that Apple sold 500,000 phones this past weekend, which, I assume, includes all outlets. If that’s true then Apple grossed $279,500,000 in less than 3 days.

That’s about 2,856 phone per hour for the weekend by my estimate (48 hours plus 4 hours on Friday), 9,615 phones per hour if we use analyst estimates. If we just account for the time Apple stores were open, which vary from store to store, but we can average the business hours 12 per day plus the 4 hours on Friday; that’s 30 hours. So by my numbers Apple sold a whopping 4,950 iPhones per hour, and using analyst estimates they sold a staggering 16,667 iPhone per hour. Whoa! (That last number is less meaningful because analysts use all outlets include Apple’s online store, which is open 24/7.)

As the reports of user satisfaction/dissatisfaction comes in and what Apple and AT&T are doing to remedy problems it would be reasonably safe to expect that there will be 1 million phones sold by the end of July. For the sake of argument, let’s say that Apple is able to sell 500,000 iPhone from its stores every 6 months. That’s 1.5 million phone by the end of 2008, or about 15% of the 10 million units Steve Jobs had hoped for by that time. That just accounting for 164 brick and mortar stores in the U.S. AT&T will likely add another 5 to 10% to the total, other outlets another 5%. So we’re looking at about 40% of the 10 million unit goal Jobs has set.

Now factor in worldwide sales, which are even harder to predict, and we see that Apple’s goals might be achievable

I played with an iPhone for about 10 minutes and I can tell you that most of the hype was not hype at all, the phone actually works as advertised. The features you see in the videos are just the beginning, there are usability features you don’t expect, like being able to have a phone conversation WHILE using other features. That alone makes the iPhone a must-have in my book. The question is; will people continue to want it?

I think so. The folks who flooded the stores this past weekend were the early adopters. The bulk of the buyers are those who don’t buy into the hype and are waiting to have a chance to see the device up close, hold it in their hands, play with it and see if it really is the phone to replace all phones. I think a vast majority of them will wind up buying the iPhone.

This was just an exercise, but it points to some of the daunting numbers Apple has to deal with if it is to achieve the 10 million unit goal. It also shows that 10 million iPhone owners by the end of 2008 is within the realm of possibility, even probability.

So, even my conservative numbers should make any Apple watcher happy.

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.