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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."
As opposed to reading statements of the obvious, just absorb the details yourself and draw your own conclusions from Apple's Press Release.
Ice Cream has no bones.
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.
I second that; it's a statement of fact from a publicly traded company. It's impressive, but predictable given their previously published numbers showing they had sold 88.7 million total at the end of last year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ipod_sales.svg
"bad firmware"
0 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.
That's not quite true. http://www.1418hell.com/ (Now offline due to bandwidth restrictions). Here's the apple docs on it (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=3
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.
Warranty replacements aren't sales. You're right that they *could* be reported that way, but they're not. If Apple issues a press release saying that they've SOLD their 100 millionth iPod today, they mean that someone(s) have bought 100 million iPods for money. They really don't have any need to inflate the figure with a deceptive practice--this water mark would be reached within a few months anyway, and it's not like they need anything to drive sales.
If the press release had said that they'd SHIPPED their 100 millionth iPod, then I'd be more inclined to entertain the possibility that it included warranty replacements. Even if 1 in 10 iPods are replaced under warranty (a seriously exaggerated number for nearly any electronic product), they'll still sell 100 million units by year's end.
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). :)
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.