Tim Cook: Apple by the numbers

Apple CEO Tim Cook came to Tuesday’s media event armed with numbers—a lot of them—to demonstrate his company’s continued dominance. The biggest number? In the  month since its release, iOS 6 has been downloaded to more than 200 million devices.

“This is phenomenal,” Cook said. “This is the fastest software upgrade rate in history, that we’re aware of.”

Cook also disclosed other new, mostly eye-popping numbers across the range of Apple’s product lineup:

• Apple sold its 100 millionth iPad two weeks ago—just two-and-a-half years after the product launched. “That’s unprecedented for a new product in a new category,” Cook said. And the tablet seems to be trouncing its competition: The iPad accounts for 90 percent of all tablet-based Internet traffic.

• More than 5 million units of the iPhone 5 have been sold since its recent launch. “It’s the fastest-selling iPhone ever,” Cook said.

• The latest version iPod nano and iPod touch, he said, have joined the rest of Apple’s iPod lineup to sell 3 million units. “Sales are going fantastic,” Cook said.

• Meanwhile, users of Apple’s Mac and iOS devices have combined to share 125 million documents in the cloud; they’ve also shared more than 60 million photos using the new shared photo streams service. And iMessage users are now exchanging 28,000 messages per second.

• On the iOS platform, Apple’s iBooks application now has 1.5 million books available; more than 400 million books have been downloaded since the app’s launch. iBooks textbooks, Cook said, are now used in more than 2,500 classrooms nationwide.

• And the broader App Store now contains 700,000 apps, including 275,000 made specifically for the iPad. Customers have downloaded more than 35 billion apps, and Apple has paid out $6.5 billion to app developers.

• The Mac product line has done pretty well, too. Cook said that for the year ending in June, its sales outgrew the PC market by seven times—the sixth straight year Apple has outperformed the market. The result? Macs are the No. 1 desktop and laptop computers in the United States.