OS 3.0 devoured 1.3 petabytes in downloads

By Nate Lanxon on 22 June 2009, 3:40pm

Roughly 1.3 petabytes, or 1.3 million gigabytes. That's how much data the six million downloads of Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 has eaten through in less than a week since its public launch last Wednesday.

OS 3.0 was a 230MB download from Apple's servers, and six million existing iPhone users downloaded it in five days. For reference, that's roughly the same as what the entire BBC iPlayer pumps out in the same period of time.

The activation, however, was plagued with problems. In fact it took us until almost midnight on the day of launch until Apple's activation servers would authenticate our installation. In the US, Apple is even offering iTunes Store credit to users who have experienced days of delays activating their iPhone 3G S.

But Apple would like you to know it's sold over a million of the new models since launch, and in the UK, O2 reported it had seen sales exceed what it saw for the iPhone 3G launch last year.

If you would like one with a one-month contract instead of 18-months or two years, check out our very popular guide.