A million iPads? No sweat!

There seemed to be a lingering question in a lot of minds right up to the launch of the iPad. Tablets had failed before, even when tried by Apple. Was this one going to fail, too? With a million sales in a month, not hardly.

When Apple originally launched the iPhone a couple of years ago, it took 74 days to sell one million units. Despite the higher price of the iPad to the consumer, Apple’s tablet sold that same number in just 28 days, a feat that Apple’s Steve Jobs described as “magical.” Jobs also said Monday that “Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.” Bear in mind that these are US-only sales, since domestic demand has been so high that Apple has not yet begun to ship the iPad in any foreign markets, where the iPad is also expected to sell well.

Put into some sort of perspective, this means that Apple has been selling about 1,000 iPads per hour, and that was before the WiFi + 3G model started shipping, according to a CRN story. It would not be a surprise to see these numbers fall off once the initial hype has run its course, but sales to the rest of the world may well more than make up for the blush coming off the rose in the U.S. The iPad success also extends to apps for the device. Apple says that, on average, each each new iPad owner has downloaded about 13 or 14 items from the App Store and / or the iBookstore during the first month.

It seems, then, that the world was ready for a tablet computer, iPad-style, this time around. The tablet computer (and especially the iPad) marketplace is even bigger than its proponents had hoped. No one thought the iPad would sell this well, and there will be other good tablets from other manufacturers entering the marketplace now that Apple has pioneered it. It is not often that a company can singlehandedly build an entirely new product milieu, but that is just what Apple seems to have done with the iPad.

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• Two million iPads in two months
• Apple sells 3 million iPads in 80 days
• Apple likely to sell 28 million iPads in 2011
• Has Apple sold 8 million iPads?
• Apple to sell 65M iPads in 2011?