100 Million iPods 241
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."
Sooo (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Why so hard to believe? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Comma chameleon, come and go, come and go (Score:3, Insightful)
Their questions are totally irrelevant... (Score:4, Insightful)
Find it hard to believe? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
It doesn't matter how many were replaced. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:The value of good user interface design... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Why is everyone so surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Sold" probably includes them all (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot editors need to get over their iPod hate (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:A bit of perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Importance of the other questions. (Score:1, Insightful)
Only in bitter dreams is there even the slimmest of chances that 95 million iPods do not work. Let's be real here: Apple did a fine job of making an accessible, easy-to-use, attractive portable music player that does a very respectable job of providing the features most users wanted. Good on them.
No need to denigrate them or their players simply because you dislike their "cool" image. Not all hot cheerleaders are mean.
Re:The value of good user interface design... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Continued sales (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the Zune has had a rough time unseating the iPod, we can assume the case is much more of the former than the latter.
Re:Their questions are totally irrelevant... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm just sayin' because you seem to lack perspective.
Re:"Sold" probably includes them all (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Microsoft can be dethroned (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's an impressive feat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A bit of perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
A bit of perspective coming your way too. Not all of those 300 million own any music player. A sizable chunk of them are kids below 4, or old people living in remote villages that have never worked on a computer, let alone know how to work with a digital music player.
So what was your point anyway.
Re:~~~100 million~~~ (Score:3, Insightful)
They may be approaching the saturation point, but the sales have been growing something like exponentially. I don't think advertising explains this; the simplest explanation is that the devices sell themselves. When people see one, they want one; when they buy one there's one more device out there making sales.
Re:Their questions are totally irrelevant... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sold. But to whom? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are two reasons why Apple probably hasn't done so, though:
First, you can't flood the channel continuously. About all you can do is collapse the sales you would have gotten next quarter into this month's sales report.
Say I'm a vendor shipping a product whose market demand is a million units per month, and I want to puff up my sales figures. I ship 1M in January and 1M in February, then flood the channel with 4M units in March. That lets me claim 6M sales for my first quarter. It makes a nice press release, but doesn't mean that I'll ship another 6M units next quarter. In fact, if the actual demand is only 1M per month, I won't ship any at all. I can do the same thing again in the third quarter and claim 12M in sales by September, hopefully snagging some consumer interest for the upcoming Christmas season. But by the end of the year, I'll still only have shipped 12M units.
Bottom line, though: nobody can flood a channel with even a significant fraction of 100M units if the product doesn't already sell damned well.
The second problem is inventory management: Apple gives Dell a run for its money in keeping the supply chain thin. Apple itself owns less than 2 days worth of inventory at any given time, IIRC.
But in the example I gave above, I needed 6M units by the end of March. If I also want to stay below 2 days of unshipped inventory, I'd need a factory that can produce 1M units/month for two months, then jump to 4M units/month for March. Then I'd have to shut the whole thing down from April through June and start the whole thing up again in July.
It's incredibly difficult and expensive to jerk a factory's production capacity around like that. You can't build the product without machinery, which is expensive and can't just be rented for a month (who's going to have that much equipment stiiting around idle?). You need labor, which requires training (another sunk expense of both money and time) and doesn't like to be laid off every other quarter. And you need components, which means your suppliers would have to be willing to deal with exactly the same problems themselves.
In a word: unlikely.