Apple Sold 2 Million iPads In 59 Days | Hacker News Reader

Apple Sold 2 Million iPads In 59 Days

techcrunch.com

51 pointsacangiano43 comments

Full Disclosure: I bought an iPad 2 days ago.

Interesting perspective: 2 million iPads in 60 days is roughly 33K/day. Google is activating 3x as many Android phones per day (and presumably growing).

An Android phone != an iPad but it makes you wonder what sales numbers will look like when we start seeing Dell tablets running Android (along with the other 5 big PC manufacturers)

As usual Apple has a huge head start, and like with the iPhone will have a 2nd generation iPad device out by the time we see any credible Android competition.

Costs for tablets will certainly spiral as manufacturing is so simple and Android is free to the OEMs. Tough comparing to iPad to Android #'s b/c everyone needs a cell phone and their lifecycle is about 1.5 years.

100% of the iPad profits go to Apple. How much of the profits go to each individual Android licensee?

That question would make sense if google were in it for the licenses.

It was in answer to the earlier post mentioning 100K Android devices shipped on a daily basis. Whereas Google makes no money from each Android device sold and in fact bears the cost of developing Android, Apple on the other hand is recovering its development/marketing expenses and takes all the profit from sales of the iPad.

How many Google ad impressions does a consumer need to see before the payoff is the same as that from selling an iPad? Or... how much is your personal data worth to you? To Google?

It's not a matter of how many ads need to be clicked to pay for the phone, it's about gaining mindshare, more searches, more people using gmail, mobile google maps ubiquity and so on. I have no idea how they could even measure revenue gained by Android use accurately, or even on what timescale they expect to really start benefiting from it, but you can be sure it's going to be huge in a few years.

I expect many people to have multiple tablets, possibly of various makes and sizes. A simple glass panel with a touch screen will be commoditized quickly. At least among geeks. Heck I'm already using my iPad as an adjunct monitor on my laptop. Imagine a few years from now when we've started to push what these things can do. The old Star Trek trope where a person has a bunch of tablet-like devices spread out on their desk, like stacks of paper, may be hear sooner than we think.

The real question is which tablets will support an active and innovative eco-system that _normal_ people will use, trust and pay to run apps on.

We all hope that one of those tablets offers a spell and sense check.

1 Company selling 1 model is very different then 20 companies selling 40 different models with 5 different versions of OS.(and 20 different skins)

Nokia sell something like 1.5 million phones a day afaik.

The only difference is that Nokia isn't as wide spread in the US as it is in Europe and Middle East. Plus Nokia targets simple users ($100 phones) while Apple and Google (SmartPhone) targets users ready to put $500+ on a phone or a tablet. So Nokia will have a much larger audience.

Right. There are two discussions to have here.

Company Success: Apple is clearly successful with those sales #s.

OS Success: It remains to be seen if the ugly/fragmented OS being sold by 20 different companies will kick the ass of the prettier/walled-garden OS sold by one company like it did with Computer OS's. If it does, it'd be sad to see it happen to Apple a second time.

I'd personally prefer to see Apple license the heck out of their OS's with stringent hardware requirements.

I'd be happy if they just made it legal to license it for use in an emulator. That would cover 99% of the use cases I have for running either of their os's (iPhone OS, OS X) on non-apple hardware.

If that's the kind of statistic that you're going to use, then count iPhones and iPod touches along with that if all we're looking at are devices running a certain OS.

There are about 75 million netbooks sold every year. Let's guess that the tablet market is 100mm at peak. Apple will be pretty happy owning the top 20% segment of that market. That is where all of the margin is at.

The Android tablets will probably have razor thin margins with Google trying to make money on the advertising and Google Apps aimed at enterprises.

Good for Apple. It's great to see a company make big jumps in the consumer market. There are too many "me too" companies that won't take a chance and invent the next big thing. Can someone talk Steve Jobs into building a consumer robot? Someone needs to kickstart this market.

Or a 3x2x1" mac nano to replace the mac mini?

Did I say for just $199?

I'd love to see how Apple would reinvent the car.

I can't find it now, but amidst the 3.3.1 kerfuffle someone blogged about what the iCar would be like. Here's what I remember from it:

If Apple made cars:

  * You'd only be able to drive them on Apple-certified roads
  * The cupholder would only accept a proprietary Apple cup
  * There would only be one pedal
  * You could have any color you want - provided it's brushed aluminium

IIRC, they were working on a project with BMW a few years ago.

Probably make it so you could only use Apple approved Petrol.

"Can someone talk Steve Jobs into building a consumer robot?"

Chances are he will talk you into buying an espresso machine instead. :)

No matter what you think about the device (and by extension Apple), these are impressive numbers.

It seems a month ago there were 4000 iPad apps made and now there are 5000?

iPad is not the same gold-rush for app developers as the iPhone was, that's for sure.

I think its mostly because there are not many NEW users. I would guess that more than 75% of iPad users own an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

No, it's different.

When the iPhone came out, it was a gold rush for a totally new field of development with almost no experienced devs (just a few companies who wrote programs for Mac knew anything about Obj C). The iPad is instead a windfall for the now existing devs. iPad growth has been very explosive though, and I think I speak for most iPhone devs in saying the platform continues to excite and delight us.

I don't understand. The number of apps seems small. The number may be wrong, or the perception may be incorrect, but the existence of a base of developers with the requisite skills should make this number higher, not lower compared with the early days of the iPhone.

Consider how many iPhone apps work essentially perfectly on the iPad, though — it's an awful cliche, but imagine if you're the maker of a 'fart app': do you do that much better by scaling your UI [still just supporting the exact same set of features... it's not like an iPad runs such apps better than an iPhone does] to fit the iPad a tiny bit better, or by adding more and better fart noises to your existing iPhone app?

How many apps did the iPhone have, 2 months in?

I guess also that because today the iPhone is a bigger market, and its apps also run on the iPad, it makes more sense to target the iPhone. Plus, the uncertainty of whether the iPad would really take off.

Now that the iPad does seem to be successful, the apps may follow.

First and foremost, getting an app for the iPad on Day 1 has been the priority for a lot of developers---presumably some of the best, too.

Second, as a developer, from a design perspective, the iPad is much harder to design for. See this as a bonus to the iPad: a sh#t deterrent. Security by obscurity if you will.

Third, the kind of applications, games aside perhaps, that feel apt may not feel as tangible as with the iPhone which was an all-portable device, meaning you could bring it with you everywhere: cities, restaurants, vacations, beaches, ski resorts, running, in a cocktail bar mixing drinks, partying, going to the theatre, for use with (acute) pocket reference, etc., etc., etc. Add to this the microphone.

I also think we are overestimating how many genuinely great apps there are in the App Store. Everyone's BS detector goes off when they hear Steve Jobs touting the number of apps in the App Store. A lot of these apps extend already existing services on behalf of companies who also develop the apps for their services, usually as a web client for an already existing internet service.

Take away the apps on my iPhone that are pocket references, out-and-about-based and extensions of services already existing in another form, and the number dwindles precipitously. And that is counting the oh-so fantastic catalogue that Jobs love to rave about.

There are a lot of challenges facing iPad developers that iPhone developers did not face. We should also accept the fact that comparing the two devices will usually be counterproductive.

It could also be that because the device is more capable, creating the applications take more work - because they are bigger, require more UI development, and because people will expect more out of them.

Give it another quarter.

I think this is because the ipad has a larger screen and thus you need to have more features (and longer dev cycle) on it or it will look empty. There is also the expectation of higher quality apps. Fart and other junk apps probably don't work very well because of this and thus the total app number is much lower.

Yeah, absolutely. Fart apps make sense on the iPhone - it's something you always have with you and you can whip it out when you're with your friends and do some cute little gimmick that's deleted 2 minutes later after the $0.99 of value has been drained from it. iPad uses are for the most part much closer to a 'traditional computing' model.

Fart apps for the iPhone: Big red button in the center of the screen that says "fart." Cost: $0.99.

Fart apps for the iPad: An array of buttons labeled things like "squeeker" and "poot" and "low rumble" and "Shock and and Awe." Plus controls for volume, stereo center, and a time line editor for layering multi-channel, multi-event sequences. Cost: $4.99.

I haven't seen an iPad yet, but I expect the design obligation to be much bigger; you can't slap something together with five default elements which already covers up 60% of the screen on an iPhone.

iPad is a canvas to the user and the designer---and the letter is a big commitment.

I don't think that there are any standard designs to iPad apps like with the iPhone.

This is why I found distasteful for Apple to predict a gold-rush for iPad apps at their keynote. It was wishful thinking actually.

We had an iPhone before the app store was created. This let us have some experience and see what worked and what didn't. Almost all developers didn't have an iPad before release. The simulator and videos from Apple are poor substitutes. So, a lot of developers are doing a lot of experimenting with real hardware and seeing what the best way to build things is. Plus, iPad apps have more features and that requires some time.

The TV Program Technow showed yesterday a school here in the Silicon Valley where each student got a iPad. They are now going to roll this program out to every student of this school beginning this upcoming school year. I am surprised how fast some schools are jumping on the technology and would not be surprised to see the iPad sales numbers to climb up even faster.

The enterprise remote tools will work well for schools (e.g. remote disable). It might be very tempting to start a company to build a library of single topic lessons (audio, video, text, and maybe some simulation) on a variety of subjects. License it to schools for a yearly fee.

Plus, you have the added bonus of no camera so you won't get sued for that :)

Actually the educational technology sector is well established, most of the large textbook companies already have programs for flowing their content into multiple application formats, and have well established sales teams that understand the market. Not to say that there aren't opportunities in that space, but you are going to have to provide unique value if you want to be competitive.

That's all about to change once Google gets their low-cost tablet out. You can already get an APad, but it's not very big. Another problem is that Android apps only have a small form factor and aren't designed yet for the larger screens.

Although my family members have the iPad bug, my major concern is what sort of impact these sales (plus next iPhone) are going to have on flash memory supplies/prices (short-term).

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