Best selling consumer products of all time

> Category: Toy
> Total sales: 350 million units
> Parent company: Seven Towns Ltd.

The Rubik’s Cube remains the top selling single toy of all time with 350 million sold since 1980. The Rubik’s Cube remains so popular that in the decades since its creation, it has spawned entire speedcubing competitions. The toy still has a large fan base, among young and old. One developer even created an iPhone application that instructs users how to solve a Rubik’s Cube in 20 moves. Unlike other best-selling toys, such as Monopoly and the Gumby Doll, the cube was not originally intended to be a toy. Its inventor, Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik, created it in 1974 as a way to teach his students three-dimensional geometry. The combined collections of Mattel’s Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels have both outsold the Rubik’s Cube, but none of them have as a single toy.

> Category: Video game console
> Total sales: 344 million units
> Parent company: Sony

When Sony released the PlayStation in the United States in 1995, its 32-bit processor was the most powerful available on the console market at the time. Sony sold more than 70 million PlayStations worldwide by the time the PlayStation 2 was released in 2000. The PlayStation 2 also sold very well in the U.S. and abroad. Sony released the PlayStation 3 in 2006, and it sold 80 million units to retailers by November 2013. The latest generation, the PlayStation 4, has been wildly successful thus-far, already selling 7 million units as of April.

> Category: Pharmaceutical
> Total sales: $141 billion
> Parent company: Pfizer

Pfizer’s Lipitor is prescribed to lower LDL (or bad) cholesterol -- high levels of bad cholesterol increase the risk of heart disease. Lipitor is classified as a statin, a class of drug used to reduce the risk of heart-related ailments. However, Lipitor sales have plummeted in recent years after its U.S. patent expired in 2011. Lipitor has lost patent protection in other major markets since. In 2013, Lipitor sales totaled $2.3 billion, down from $9.6 billion in 2011 according to Pfizer’s 2013 annual report. Still, since its introduction in 1997, no other drug came close to Lipitor’s commercial success. The closest competitor for all time sales is Plavix, which had slightly more than half of Lipitor’s lifetime revenue, according to Forbes.

> Category: Tablet
> Total sales: 211 million units
> Parent company: Apple

Despite losing market share in the first quarter, Apple’s iPad is still the best-selling tablet. The iPad held 40% of the tablet market in the first quarter of 2013, but only 32.5% in the first quarter of this year, according to market research firm IDC. Close rival Samsung picked up much of that market share. IDC analyst reported that iPad lost some of its market share because consumers are holding onto their tablets for longer rather than immediately purchasing the newest version. Apple sold 16.4 million units in the second quarter alone, and more than 211 million since the iPad was first introduced in 2010.

> Category: Video game franchise
> Total sales: 262 million units
> Parent company: Nintendo

Since debuting in 1981 in the popular Donkey Kong arcade game, the Italian plumbers have appeared in 115 titles and in their own cartoon series. According to the company, as of 2011 more than 262 million units of “core” Mario Bros. games have been sold worldwide. Mario originally was known as Jumpman in a Japanese arcade game before being converted into a plumber in the U.S. In 2011, the Guinness Book of World Records named the original Mario the top video game character of all time as voted-on by more than 13,000 readers.

> Category: Album
> Total sales: 70 million units
> Parent company: Epic records

Michael Jackson’s Thriller is not only the best-selling album of all time, but is also credited with ushering in the MTV generation, bringing the moonwalk into mainstream culture, and giving Jackson the moniker “The King of Pop.” According to michaeljackson.com, a website run by Sony Music and owned by the Michael Jackson record label, 70 million copies of the album have been sold since its release in 1982, although various sources have estimated that as many as 110 million copies have been sold. The album featured hits: “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” and “Thriller.” Perhaps what made the album most famous was the 14-minute long "Thriller" movie/music video. The Thriller album also sold 101,000 copies the week after Jackson’s death in 2009, and downloads of Jackson’s songs totaled 2.3 million.

> Category: Smartphone
> Total sales: 516 million units
> Parent company: Apple

Apple took the smartphone market by a storm when it launched the iPhone in 2007. Despite suggestions from some analysts that the iPhone’s market share has peaked, unit sales remain massive. In its fiscal first and second quarter, the company sold nearly 95 million iPhones, and sales this year are poised to exceed the 150 million mark set in 2013. With the exception of a brief period in 2012, Apple’s iPhone has been the best-selling smartphone since its inception. According to Counterpoint Technology Research, the iPhone 5S and 5C were the two top-selling smartphones in February, while the Samsung Galaxy S4 was a distant third.