Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion

blogs.yankeegroup.com

20 pointsjacquesm13 comments

The article's main claim is: Apple’s iPad will likely take the crown for the fastest consumer product growth to the $1 billion revenue mark in history, taking less than 80 days from the beginning of pre-orders to reach that milestone.

What about Modern Warfare 2, which reached the same milestone in two months? [1] A console game in a physical box doesn't seem to be any less of a consumer product.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10434464-52.html

Wasn't MW2 available for pre-order for something like six months?

edit: I can find mention of pre-ordres of MW2 being available as far back as April '09

The iPad was rumored as far back as May 2001: http://fury.com/2001/05/apples-ipad-the-next-big-thing

But more seriously, it's not quite clear to me why preorders are particularly relevant here as the marketing approaches are so different. Most iPads are sold directly by Apple, whereas a console game is available through thousands of retailers. It makes sense that those retailers were taking preorders a long time before release. (I'm sure somewhere preorders were being taken for the now perhaps cancelled Win7-equipped HP Slate, despite the lack of an official release date.)

The Wired post (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/apples-ipad-muted-res...) he linked to isn’t “pundits […] claiming that the iPad would fail.” It’s a summary of their readers’ responses to the iPad announcement.

The curious thing about the article is that he fails to mention Apple's sales of the iPad so far are only really US based sales.

I'm more curious to see if there's going to be an upswing when the rest of the world is able to purchase them.

Yep Apple can make a $500 purchase feel like buying an iPod rather than buying a laptop.

The iPad is very similar to the iPod touch... calling it a new product is a stretch.

True, in the same way that a swimming pool is very similar to a bathtub. Played any water sports in your bathtub lately?

> Played any water sports in your bathtub lately?

That doesn't mean what you think it means.

hint: google.

A few water sports commonly practiced in swimming pools, all utterly impossible to do in a bathtub:

* Swimming

* Synchronized swimming

* Water aerobics

* Water gymnastics

* Diving

* Synchronized diving

* Waboba

* Water polo

* Water volleyball

Click on the second search result.

I think people get what you're saying, they just think it's stupid.

When I order a computer with more memory and a bigger monitor, is that a new product too?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com