New numbers from a survey conducted for Morgan Stanley says that Apple could sell as many as 36 million iPhones in Q4 of 2011 and possibly as many as 190 million iPhones in 2012. The survey was conducted by AlphaWise on behalf of Morgan Stanley, and the numbers gathered in the survey came out to be quite a bit higher than most estimates.
The survey from AlphaWise pegged Apple's 2012 iPhone sales at 190 million, which is 42% higher than Morgan Stanley's original estimates of 134 million iPhones, and almost 50% higher than the street estimate of 127 million (and, at the risk of having your brains explode with numbers, that would be a crazy 3.65 million iPhones sold per week in 2012.) Across the board the numbers from the new survey were much higher than original estimates. Morgan Stanley's chief Apple analyst, Katy Huberty, was even more surprised to find that the numbers suggest that iPhone sales will be even higher in Q1 of 2012, where the survey estimates sales could hit 41 million.
Even more amazing given the widely repeated calls for the end of the tablet boom (or the iPad boom, depending on who you ask), AlphaWise found that 27% of respondents still plan to buy a tablet. The last bit of info is where it drops too far into the hypothetical world, though. Huberty estimates that Apple could boost iPad sales about 10 million units above Apple's manufacturing order if the entry-level iPad 2 were dropped to $399 and the original iPad were dropped to $99. This part is certainly possible, although a price drop from Apple usually only happens with the release of new hardware, like the iPad 3 or iPad 2+ or whatever it may be, and new hardware throws off the estimates, because then the entry-level device is no longer the 16 GB WiFi iPad 2.
