Apple has just announced that they have sold three million new iPads since its release last Friday. It’s a staggering number. Clearly, they are unstoppable at this point. The future is here to stay, people.
It’s truly impressive. It’s only one million below iPhone 4S-level numbers. Except the iPad costs a lot more money and, theoretically, it doesn’t have as much use as a phone.
Two more data points for comparison: it took the original iPad 80 days to reach the three million unit mark. Eighty days. Then it took the iPad 2 28 days to reach one million units, although the iPad 2 was only initially available in the United States. The iPad 3 has been launched simultaneously in a lot of big markets: US, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, as well as Puerto Rico, Switzerland and the US Virgin Islands.
The multiple market availability accounts for a lot of those three million, but it’s still a very impressive number.
Looking at these statistics, it seems like the iPad can be the new iPod indeed. The iPad and App Store tandem is so solid at this point that they may be able to keep the hegemony of the tablet market for years, just like the iPod did redefining the music player in tandem with the iTunes store. Google and Microsoft are going to have an extremely hard time attacking this formidable armoured machine.
Remember when some people said that tablets were never going to catch on? Well, I hate to tell you I told you so, but I told you so. This is the future of computing, no matter how you look at it. Just like the minicomputer took the hegemony over the mainframe and the desktop took it from the minicomputer, the tablet is doing exactly the same, which is why you have Google and Microsoft racing against the Cupertino giant.