100 Million iPods

prelelat writes "I find it somewhat hard to believe but this story over at PC world, indicates that the iPod has sold over 100 million units. It also asks how many are broken and replaced which makes me believe the number may be more accurate."

Obligatory.

"No wireless. More space than a Zune. Lame."
- CmdrBallmer

Re: 15 Units?

Only if you count the 15 that Beve Stalmer bought

He has a deal with his local furniture dealer. For every chair he buys, he gets one Zune for free.

Comma chameleon, come and go, come and go

I personally, find it funny, how some people, tend to abuse commas. What is so hard, to understand? This has to be one of the worst headlines ever. It took me 4 times reading it before I started to think I understood what the author was getting at.

To keep on-topic, my 3G 15GB iPod still works just fine. The battery doesn't last the 8 or so hours it used to (more like 6 now), but it still runs like a champ.

Re:Comma chameleon, come and go, come and go

Cammas have, another use, to indicate, a pause. You are, William Shatner, AICMFP.

Comma problems?

There was a single comma in the entire summary. It wasn't really used correctly, but it really shouldn't have taken you four tries to understand.

Well, now I know how to obfusticate any sensitive documentation. Just insert commas where they don't belong and a certain proportion of slashdot readers will waste valuable brain cycles attempting to decipher it. Whereas my loyal minions, having simpler brains, will ignore any and all punctuation marks and will implement my open source doomsday devices first.

Lame.

No wireless. Less space than 100 million nomads. Lame.

"Sold" probably includes them all

Generally the management of these numbers is designed to make sales numbers look good. There is nothing stopping warantee replacement units being reflected as a zero-dollar sale, so long as you don't mess with the actual revenue numbers.

Even if there's a 10% warantee number, that still makes for 90M-or-so real sales. That is not too suprising considering how iconic the ipod is and how much Apple have invested in creating that image.

I wonder what Apple's advertising budget is for ipod? It probably gets to be somewhere around a buck per unit.

Re:"Sold" probably includes them all

It all depends on how the numbers are reported.

Many companies run their service centres as a seperate business unit because that's simpler. I don't know if Apple do this, but they might. If they do, then replacement units get sold to the service centres who then charge a service fee back to the ipod business unit. This is a far neater way to handle stock levels etc.

Regardless, I do agree that they have no need to pump up sales numbers. They're doing fine with no embellishment.

Sooo

"I find it somewhat hard to believe but this story over at PC world, indicates that the ipod has sold over 100 million units. It also asks how many are broken and replaced which makes me believe the number may be more accurate."

A) More accurate than what?

B) Hard to believe? The company is making a statement of fact flat out, and just not including the caveats such as replacement or upgrade purchases.

Slow. News. Day.

Oh, and the actual article

As opposed to reading statements of the obvious, just absorb the details yourself and draw your own conclusions from Apple's Press Release [apple.com].

A bit of perspective

Let's put this in perspective. Not all of these buyers were American, and many of them have probably owned more than one iPod, but the population of the United States is slightly over 300 million. And Apple has apparently sold 100 million.

Re:A bit more

I wouldn't think that it would be outrageous to think that there are 50+ million iPods sitting on store shelves and in warehouses right now.

Are you serious?

Let's say the iPod was released in 2001. They've sold 100 million units. But if, as you claim, 50+ million are in stores/warehouses, that means they've sold about 50 million in the 6 years since release.

Apple refresh the iPod lines every 1 or 2 years. This means the sales life-span of a model is 2 years max.

So your argument is that Apple keep SIX YEARS' worth of stock in the supply chain? And that of that stock, 4 years' worth, or about 33 MILLION will never be sold, because a new replacement model will be out by then?

Well, you've convinced me.

Re:A bit of perspective

I've been gifted a Shuffle, and I've gifted iPod nanos to two people. And I'd bought a regular iPod which I later sold.

So, technically, I purchased 4 iPods according to Apple. There you go, skewing of stats, right there.

Huh? No, according to Apple, based on what you've said, you've purchased 3 (someone else purchased one and gifted it to you, but there's no way they'd know that it ended up in your hands, so by their count, you've only purchased three, because in fact, you've only purchased three). And how does the fact that you purchased three iPods skew the stats about the number of iPods sold? You purchased three, they count that has having sold three. 3 != 3?

The value of good user interface design...

In my opinion the reason the iPod succeeded in the marketplace is the tight integration of hardware and software... the whole system just works. You don't have to worry about, missing DLLs, bad firmware that causes the interface to become unresponsive, or other strange errors that manifest themselves on competing digital music players. I used to have a no-brand hard disk based player that would cause a horrible screeching noise in the earphones whenever the disk spun up to access the next chunk of music data. Never had this problem on my iPod. Also, for example, when you pull your headphone plug out of the earphone jack, my iPod automatically goes into Pause mode. They obviously put a sensor on the earphone jack that detects the presence of something plugged in, and tied that into the firmware... this provides a seamless intuitive interface to the end-use. This is why they have sold 100 million players, and profited from it, and rightly so. Highly paid and well motivated creative engineers will always trounce cheap, carelessly designed and manufactured, knock-offs.

I Don't Love You

I used to have a no-brand hard disk based player that would cause a horrible screeching noise in the earphones whenever the disk spun up.

The company returned this guy's iPod with the following message: "Not faulty. Supposed 'horrible screeching noise' turned out to be My Chemical Romance's latest single."

Re:The value of good user interface design...

Yeppers. I had a Toshiba GigABeat and ended up taking it back to get the 80Gb Video. It just works well. No lock into their download format or archaic DRM. Accessories are plentiful (the main reason I switched back...I had a Nano before) and function is intuitive. Like you mention, I don't even need to take it out of my pocket to "pause" it when I am done riding/running/whatever and don't want the battery to drain from leaving it on by accident.

People love to naysay the dominant market player, which is ironically the one getting trounced in the OS realm. I really do hope their new agreement for higher quality music takes off. I'm going to soon buy a permanent dock to dock my iPod with my high-end home audio system. So the new format will be greatly appreciated and I don't mind paying a few extra $$ for a high-def quality rip of Dark Side of the Moon.

Re:The value of good user interface design...

>and I don't mind paying a few extra $$ for a high-def quality rip of Dark Side of the Moon

Why dont you pay $10 for the CD and make a lossless rip of it using, say, Apple Lossless for use on your stereo? And then have a 192kbps VBR AAC rip for your iPod when its on the go and you care about quantity rather than too much quality? All without DRM.

Re:The value of good user interface design...

"bad firmware"

That's not quite true. http://www.1418hell.com/ [1418hell.com] (Now offline due to bandwidth restrictions). Here's the apple docs on it (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30 4508). Switching to iTunes 7 caused major problems for a lot of people (me included). For about 2 weeks I basically had a bricked iPod; I couldn't restore because there were major problems with the iTunes 7 and its new integrated iPod management.

I've also had major problems with Apple Firmware updates on my 60 gb 5G ipod. After updating firmware, I regularly find that Apple has dropped support for a specific video resolution or bit rate (the iPod is ridiculously temperamental with video support), which means half of the videos on my iPod don't work.

Now I don't ever upgrade my firmware; I'm really not missing out on much I guess.

Microsoft can be dethroned

You're so right on the money.

This is the reason that Microsoft can be dethroned--when you have good design, you can beat the giants. When you have shitty design and you are a giant, your product doesn't sell (Zune, case in point).

This is why Apple is sending shivers through the phone industry with the iPhone.

I predict that 2008 will be the year of actually easy to use phones, because of the well-designed competition by the iPhone.

Thank you Apple for raising the bar.

Why so hard to believe?

Even with a failure rate of 10% (which is extraordinary), that is still 90m iPods sold.

Apple has done extraordinarily well here with the iPod and is poised to shape the future of digital downloads (software and media) with their iTunes Store.

Probably at least 5M units broken...

If we assume a failure rate of 5%...

Of course, the real question is whether or not the proportion of lost/broken/damaged/stolen/etc iPods is similar to other devices. After all, do iPods really have a higher failure rate, or is it because there's more of them, you hear more about them?

(And before you start blaming the non-replacable battery - there are few devices other than cellphones, cameras and laptops where having a replacable battery actually is useful - it's likely by the time you need a replacement, the battery isn't even made anymore... Can you get replacement Li-Ion batteries for the many HPaq PDAs out there other than the current model/phone models? Or the multitude of 'superior' mp3 players of at least a couple years vintage?)

Their questions are totally irrelevant...

Apple said they sold 100 million iPods. What difference does it make how many were replacement iPods for broken or stolen units? If anything, that would only make the case that much stronger for the popularity of the iPod: People were willing to buy another one to replace a broken or stolen one. What does he mean when he says "how many are sitting in drawers"? What does that have to do with anything? I'm sure any portable music player would be happy if they sold 10% as many and they were all sitting in drawers. This entire article is a troll...

Hmm

1E8 x 2E10 bytes (avg) = 2E18 bytes = 2 exabytes

1 song = 4E6 bytes

Total songs = 2E18 bytes / 4E6 bytes = 5E11 songs

1 song via ITMS = $1

Total cost to fill all ipods = 500 000 000 000 dollars

GDP of New Zealand = 108 520 000 000

Thus, it would take 5E11/1.08E11 = 4.62 years worth of New Zealand's national product to fill all ipods with music.

Wow! That is a lot of music!

Find it hard to believe?

As a publicly-traded company, it would be pretty hard to fudge these numbers and get away with it, but I guess anything is possible.

The guy that wrote the article sounds extremely bitter... did he design the Zune or something? Waaa waaa how many of those replaced old ipods or were stolen? WHO CARES? The press release is for ipods sold, not ipods currently in use. 100 million sold is amazing, no matter how you slice it.

Not sure why it's so hard to believe.

I find it somewhat hard to believe but this story over at PC world, indicates that the iPod has sold over 100 million units. It also asks how many are broken and replaced which makes me believe the number may be more accurate.

The press release doesn't say that there are 100 million units presently in use by 100 million people around the world today, now, right here. It says that they've moved 100 million ipods. Some percentage of that 100 million has surely been broken, been stolen, been lost, been destroyed, etc. Some percentage is probably sitting on a desktop somewhere and almost never gets used. But the total number sold apparently is over 100 million.

Anecdotally, I have gone through three ipods... a 3G which I carelessly dropped on concrete from about 5 feet, and a 5G which replaced the broken 3G, which I use every day. I was also given a nano as a gift, and I use that at the gym, so I don't have to worry about dropping the 5G. Looking around at the gym, I would also estimate 30% or so of the people in my line of sight at any time there are plugged into a nano or shuffle; In addition, ipods are a very common sight on desks during the day at work, too.

I don't think 100 million ipods sold to date is a particularly unbelievable number. If they told me there were 100 million ipods sold, and they're all still alive "in the wild," that would be pretty hard to swallow.

Who gives a shit

Really, Apple have sold a lot. Why would they lie, we know it is the most successful mp3 player on the planet, why must everything be nitpicked. In this case, its a huge conspiracy, Apple might not have sold a hundred million, they could be one or two off the mark. Shit they are still selling them now so any inaccuracies have been covered by today's sales. Talk about slow news day on the writers part. Apple puts out a fairly unremarkable press piece and somebody ponders whether they are telling the whole truth or not. Did anybody challenge SONY when they declared their sales figures for the Original Walkman? Yes, I'm a fanboy but I didn't give a shit in the first place, I saw the headline on macrumors.com and didn't bother to investigate any further because its a non event to me. Come back to me when Apple sell 100 million macs in a 5 year period then dispute those figures.

It doesn't matter how many were replaced.

The statistic is about "sold", so even if I replace my iPod every day, I put money out of my pocket and buy a new iPod.

Apple profits from selling the hardware, not from the active userbase, in fact, they benefit from smaller userbase (less loss/load on iTunes) that refreshes its hardware often.

Even if it was one single crazy guy, who bought 100 million iPods, Apple doesn't give a damn.

MciPod

over 10 billion sold

That's an impressive feat

Taking in account that it took 20 years [tvhistory.tv] for televisions to sell about 70 millions sets on US (source [tvhistory.tv]. I don't have stats for radio and phone sets, but 100 million units is an impressive feat regardless of substitution pieces or upgrades.

Re:That's an impressive feat

You also have to take into account that TV's weren't widely available until nearly ten years after they were first introduced (and were essentially banned for five years), the US population is 60% larger than it was even at the end of the time period you quote, the US is much more affluent than it was back then, and of course a very significant number of those iPods were sold outside the US. Still impressive, but very difficult to compare. If TV had been able to jump to the mass market the way products today can, no doubt it would've achieved widespread adoption much faster.

Perspective

Here's a comparison I put together from Wikipedia/Google.

Nintendo DS: 39.8 million (total sales)
Gameboy: 69 Million (total sales)
Gameboy Advance: 77 million (total sales)
iPod: 100 million (total sales)
Cellphones: 2,000 million (currently in use)

I think I have a better understanding of why they built the iPhone...

Sold. But to whom?

I am pretty certain this number relates to how many iPods Apple has sold to retailers; not how many those retailers have sold to the public. Wal-Mart places an order for iPod and bam! There's another 100,000 units 'sold'. And are we talking about all iPods here? Some of those 1st gen Shuffles are practically given away by some retailers (i.e. all orders over $499 get a free iPod Shuffle!).

Re:Sold. But to whom?

There are accounting rules for what sales Apple can count.

The rules are roughly: Apple can count an item as sold as soon as it leaves the company, AND Apple can be quite sure that the buyer will pay for it. If Walmart buys 100,000 iPods and has a contract that they have to pay for them no matter whether they sell them to end users or not, then Apple can count them as sold (even if Walmart can't shift them. Apple _has_ sold them). If Walmart buys 100,000 iPods and has a contract that they have to pay for those that they sell on to end users, and can return the others at any time, then Apple can count those as sold that Walmart has sold on.

If Apple sells 100,000 iPods to a seller that signed a contract that forces them to pay, but that seller goes bankrupt and Apple doesn't get the money, and doesn't get the iPods back, then I believe they can be counted as sold, and Apple's loss from bad debt is counted somewhere else in the books. I haven't heard of any such case.

Why is everyone so surprised?

Why is everyone shocked at the total of 100 million iPods sold and calling conspiracy over it? After all, the PS2 had over 115 million units shipped worldwide by December 2006 [wikipedia.org]. Do people not believe that figure?

My wife and I have 5 between us...

iPod - 40GB (3/4th gen?)
iPod Mini (1st gen)
iPod Nano (2nd gen)
iPod Shuffle (1st gen)
iPod Shuffle (2nd gen)

I've been tempted to get the 5.5gen iPod, but I think I'll wait for widescreen.

Slashdot editors need to get over their iPod hate

Nice, select the one negative article about this news. Well done. Lame.

Given that 80 million iPods have been sold in the last two years - wait, Apple said they had sold 10m in early 2005 - so 90 million iPods in the last two years, I'd guess that the vast majority of them are in use (i.e., they work and aren't under the sofa missing) still (even if they were stolen!).

My iPod nano is 20 months old and I use it all the time still.

I bet that over time less than 10 million iPods sold were due to a previous iPod breaking and being out of warranty. Probably less than 5 million. Likely less than 2 million. Apple will sell than many in a couple of weeks, so it's a rather pointless argument anyway.

Anyway, why doesn't this thinking apply to other manufacturers? Sony - 120m or so PS2s for example. Sold == Sold in anybody's book.

Coincidence

* What's the exact figure of how many iPods have been lost (I once left mine on an Air France flight) or stolen?

That's a coincidence, I found mine on an Air France flight!

Price Point

This doesn't really surprise me. I know Google has purchased thousands of shuffles just as corporate giveaways, and I don't doubt that many other companies have done the same. The price point of the shuffles and nanos is so low that anyone can get their hands on them. And most people who have the hard disk-based iPods seem to have a smaller version as well for the gym, or whatever. Heck, we have received two shuffles as corporate giveaways, and we haven't even resold them. They're so small that we're just waiting to lose them, put them through the wash, or drop them in the toilet (actually, we have already dropped one in the toilet and it survived just fine). :)

i agree

The number does seem hard and somewhat hard to believe but drawing from my own personal experiences with the ipod, I find the number to be realistic. I was given the ipod mini as a gift about 3 years ago and since that time, I have had to replace it 3 times and I don't think that I am the only one who has had to do this. Therefore, when apple says that they have sold over 100 million ipods, I tend to believe them.

I might have been #100mil

I just got my iPod a week ago. Got an 8GB black Nano. Love it! I wanted a solid state player that could store at least 1,000 tracks and have enough room for podcasts. The Nano fit the bill for me.

the most important point to me is.....

The quality of the sound.
MP3 is a terrible format, yes I know a lot of people tell me,"it's alright, I use the highest rate available", but it still sounds like excrement, with nasty high frequency artifacts that make my teeth jangle and destroyed dynamics.
Seriously I was in a nightclub a few weeks ago and they had installed an MP3 based music system and apart from all the high frequency narkiness that was giving me a headache the lack of dynamics made the resultant mix of songs so BORING that even the dedicated clubbers were getting turned off.
Apple on the other hand worked a bit harder on their codec and came up with something that did not destroy the music as much.
As I once wrote before try this test (With thanks to Paul D. Lehrman, of Mix Magazine and a teacher of audio).
take a mono wave file, convert it to both MP3 (any rate you choose), and 'MP4a'(Apples format).
Now convert both of these back to .wav. Using your favourite wave editing program. invert the original wave file and then add it to each of the converted and reconverted files.
For a perfect conversion there should be total cancellation,that is, to give an example, if you add the inverted wave file to the original wav file there will be nothing left over.
My experience is that the apple codec will leave a few specks on the graph but nothing more than a few clicks and pops will be audible.
The Mp3 codec will leave you with enough of the song behind that you will be able to recognise the track and even sing along with it.
Paul Lehrman from mix magazine goes into this in more detail and someone else may be kind enough to provide a pointer to the exact article.

But in the meantime here are some references from music industry professionals (not RIAA but the real ones who do the work and love music) :
http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_consumer_conundrum/ index.html [mixonline.com]

even students notice the difference :
http://mixonline.com/newmedia/internetaudio/audio_ kids_right/index.html [mixonline.com]

5 were purchased by my household

1, an original 40 GB model, died an early death. Then I bought a mini which I use once every three months in my car. I bought my wife a mini for Christmas two years ago and she never used it - not once. Then I bought her a Nano and she used it 2-3 times. Neither of us have ever bought any music through iTunes. All of my music was ripped from my CD collection or purchased from more reasonably priced online stores (with better music selections). iPod's are cool...for about give minutes. Then I want to go back to listening to NPR or actually talking to other people.

Meh, nothing...

Last time I checked, the global population was 6,587,774,956, so that doesn't even scratch the surface. Try harder Apple!

In a dump, who cares?

I wonder how many IBM PC Juniors are in a dump/landfill/creek bed in China. Does it matter. Certainly any workable iPod is hung on a pocket of pre-teen/teen/yuppy in world. Even *broken* ones have value, see eBay.

100 Million iPods

It is not hard to believe that Apple has sold over 100 million iPods worldwide, when you take in a number of different factors. The first factor is that the iPod has the personal music industry dominated; whether it be the very effective opetating format or the the software (iTunes), Apple has it all and no other device comes close to challenging it. Also you must take into effect that the United States is not the only country who can generate large sales when it comes to technological purchases. Countries like Japan, China, South Korea, and Germany are all growing in their IT/TC areas, and the purchases of things like iPods becomes more and more frequent. Finally the iPod has had 3 generations now with a 4th to come, and within each generation the sales have been astronomical which leaves a worthy explanation of that 100 Million sold mark

100 Million iPods.....

....And not one sold into the Ballmer household.

Stupid article

This is too stupid to comment on. ipods have won the battle 2 years ago - they will be the dominant music player for the next 20 years. Thats all. By next year the total will be 150 million, maybe more. if Macs grow at 30 percent for 10 years, Apple will be bigger than Microtrash. Watch it happen. They will then sell at least 60 million macs a year - thats 15 billion profit - more than M$ have ever made in a year. plus the iphone and the ipod - try 20 billion profit per year. Its called change - get used to it.

D'OH

The first iPod came out 6 years ago. Obviously some of these are replacements for broken or obsolete iPods - just like with any other electronics device. Does it matter? No. A sold iPod is a sold iPod, and if Apple managed to sell an iPod to a person who lost or destroyed his or hers, it means they were satisfied enough with their iPod to buy from Apple again.

Personally, I've owned two different iPods. One of the original "mechanical wheel" iPods (which I sold - it still works), and an iPod nano (which obviously also still works, it's quite new).

Microsoft has sold over 47 Zunes!

Going by the poll on that page, anyway.

Leave it alone

Apple sells 100 million iPods, joining a consumer electronics club with only the Sony Walkman and the Nintendo whatever, and of course Slashdotters can't deal with it. My original 5 GB had a battery go bad a few months after I lost it for about a month, and thus didn't recharge it. Should we strike that off the list, so it's only 99,999,999? Well, actually, I spent $30, replaced the battery, and then sold it when I bought my 20 GB model. That worked fine, but I replaced it with the 30 GB video iPod. I sold the 20 GB model. Since I sold them to friends, who were happy to get a cheap, $100 iPod in both cases, should you add the resold models?

The accountants added up all the sales and came up with 100 million. What's so hard to believe about that?

You know, President Bush has an iPod, and they released his playlists except for the top-secret podcasts he gets from Jesus. Do you hate America?

Most iPods Are Still Young

Most of the 100,000,000 iPods are minis and nanos. Those models are only a few years old. The way the sales took off during the 4G and mini time and then exploded with 5G and nano, most of the iPods ever sold were just sold in the last 2-3 years. The monochrome ones are just a drop in the bucket.

the truth is

You should read up on the real story behind 100 Million iPods [apple-group.com]

Re:But What About...

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all iPods are created equal."

I have a dream that my iPods will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their case but by the content of their hard drive.

Let music ring.

Re:Note To Apple: Dump The Mac

If Apple hadn't released OS X, where would the OS market be now? There's no contesting that most of Vista's user-visible additions (Aero, etc.) are Microsoft's direct response to competition from OS X. Just like IE7 is a direct result of Firefox's success. Apple is also almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that computers are no longer beige. Competition is good, and Apple makes a profit on their Macs. Trolls like you seem to forget that profit, not world domination, is the goal of capitalism. There is no economic reason for Apple to abandon the Mac market.

Also, if Apple sold off the "good bits" of OS X, they would be re-incarnated into a less polished product[s] without the backwards compatibility, and then they would wither and die.

Why dump something growing 30% a year?

It would be more prudent for Microsoft to dump the XBox, the Zune, Live Search, and Zune Marketplace before Apple should dump the Mac.

Especially seeing how a little less than half of their profits each year stem from the Mac. Dumping the Mac would almost automatically require them to dump half their workforce, more or less.

Re:100 iPods sold or created?

"I have a 4G iPod which Apple replaced 5 times. Do all of them count?"

If you paid money for all 5 then yes. Warranty replacements are not sales.

As an aside, I had one glitch with my 4G Nano once. Other than that, flawless.

Re:100 iPods sold or created?

Yikes do you have bad luck. My first-generation died when it drowned, but I put a new hard drive in it and it came back to life - so I have a well-worn first-generation that has "survived" a drowning. You're like that lady in New York who survived the Macy's parade float knocking a lamp-post into her, only to have a Yankee pitcher fly a plane into her living room.

My shuffle did die after I yanked it hot from a PC, though...