Yet, they still sell..... Who would be the potential customers?
As previously mentioned, this is only curiosity.
My guess is learners and classes are buying many of them. One hobbyist after another, one learner after another, year after year. Each person learns using one or two, burns a few by mistake, and moves on. Look at all the tutorials for 555 timers that are out there.
I wonder what the quantity of new or good 555 timers are just sitting in parts drawers never to be used again. Nothing wrong with them. If we could only get these to new learners they'd never have to make any more ever again.
There is no way the “newbies” market can consume a billion 555s a year. Heck, I doubt it could consume 1% of that. Nor are people squirreling them away at that pace, there’s no logic in that, now that basically everyone has access to distributors that can get us common parts in a day or two. They have to be going into products. I know we occasionally see them pop up in teardown videos.
Well I did say hobbyists et al.
buy many of them, not that they bought all of them. I'm very careful how I say things on this forum after so many years here, I know what kind of trouble you can get into if you don't carefully word things.
However, I did some research just now and i can't find any objective evidence of the total sales number for "555 timer". As others have stated, the One Billion number seems to have stemmed from some interview with this person Hans Camenzind. We simply do not know it's correct
now. We also do not know how many new learners and existing hobbyists are out there (do we?).
I just checked the price for 555 timer DIP package on Digikey. It's $1.31 ea., or $1.17 ea, for quantity 10.
So this is like filling in numbers for the Drake equation. Many of the numbers come out of my a$$. If you have 1 billion being sold ( it's probably less but ...) the hobbyists / learners / educational institutions are buying some. But that doesn't mean each individual entity each buys ONE 555 timer. It means the parts go to far less entities because they buy more than one ea.
How about the individual learner / hobbyist? How many are there? 10 million worldwide? Maybe they buy five ea. on average because the price is very low. Now we're talking 10 million entities buying 50 million 555 timers per year.
The teaching institutions buy even more. Maybe the institutions that use them buy 5000 555 timers ea. (on average) and the number of institutions are 10,000. (we're talking worldwide now). So they all buy 5000 * 10,000 = 50 million 555 timers.
Now we are up to 100 million 555 timers per year just for the hobbyists / learners / teaching institutions. That's 1/10 of the mysterious One Billlion number. The rest is industry buying. If we want to agree the 1 billion number is really less now, I can easily support my claim that hobbyists / learners / teaching institutions buy many of them. But I have no way of knowing how many they buy, but like the Drake equation I can get the answer I want if you give me a little time to play with the numbers.
Note: And each person can get the answer they want too because we do not have enough objective evidence.