Let"s get this out of the way first, Apple made a lot, and we mean a LOT more money on smartphone sales than Microsoft did but, if you count all the handsets that Microsoft sold during the last quarter, they actually sold more devices than Apple.
During the last calendar quarter, Microsoft sold 30.3 million non-Lumia phones (Asha handsets, "feature phones" and Nokia X Android devices), along with 5.8 million Lumia Windows Phones for a total of 36.1 million devices, whereas Apple sold 35.2 million iPhones.
We should point out too - before you head to the comments and proclaim that Lumia sales fell off of a cliff - that the figures that Microsoft quoted today are from April 25th onward. Why April 25th? That"s the day the acquisition closed and Microsoft became responsible for the handset division.
The numbers are interesting in that Microsoft now sells more devices per quarter than Apple, and while not all of them run a version of Windows Phone (yet), Microsoft does have a massive market to, if nothing else, introduce its brand name and potentially bundle a few low-end versions of its applications on these devices.
We know that we are not comparing like-devices, of course, and no-one is pretending that a Nokia 108 is the same as an iPhone. Still, as far as mobile handsets go - in the broadest definition - Microsoft did out-ship Apple but they only did so because of ultra-low-cost dumb-phones. In terms of smartphones, Apple absolutely crushed Lumia shipments, even if you extrapolate out the data to include the entire month of April for Lumia sales, Microsoft still trailed by a wide margin.
Image Credit: Microsoft