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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."
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.
Ice Cream has no bones.
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.
GPL Deconstructed
I doubt very many iPod failures are the result of being poorly manufactured, I'm willing to bet 95% of dead iPods are the result of hard-drive failures caused by users repeatedly dropping them.
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...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
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...
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 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. Do people not believe that figure?
Status symbols only serve the purpose of moving money from the working class back to the wealthy.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
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.
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?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Required disclaimer: I'm not an apple fanboy and don't even own any music player yet.
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.
>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.
If 95 million did not work, sales would be zero right now. The fact sales continue to be good means failure rate is not anywhere near that high, or the devices are so much more desirable currently than any other player around that people re-buy them anyway. Either way, sales continue.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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 do you Apple fanbois constantly make this incorrect assumption that anyone who is anti-Apple is automatically pro-Microsoft?
Personally, I wouldn't be seen dead owning an iPod or a Zune. I have a 2GB £20 (=$35) music player that:
1. Mounts as a USB drive I can read/write files to in both Linux and Windows.
2. Supports MP3 and Ogg - the only two music formats of any importance.
3. Nobody is going to mug me for it.
4. If I leave it on a plane or in a taxi, it's no great loss.
In my 45 years on this earth, I have never found a good reason to own an Apple product - and since I'm now far too old to worry about making fashion statements, I probably never will either...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting phenomenon.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, vendors can push inventory onto retailers.. it's called 'flooding the channel'. Microsoft may have done that with Zunes to meet its projected sales goals, based on its sales numbers per month for the year.
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.