Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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 can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
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?)
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!
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
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.
GPL Deconstructed
Taking in account that it took 20 years for televisions to sell about 70 millions sets on US (source. I don't have stats for radio and phone sets, but 100 million units is an impressive feat regardless of substitution pieces or upgrades.
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.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Agreed.
Moreover, I wonder how many of us replaced and upgraded our various cassette or CD players. I've easily owned 4 or 5 walkmen and several diskmen, and countless car and home players. It's not like Sony's sales numbers were grounded on devices that no one replaced. Overtime those product lines gained new features, grew smaller / lighter, needed fewer batteries, adopted new form factors, etc. Moreover, like large iPods, they were devices that had movable parts and crapped out from time to time.
There is also the issue of needing separate cassette and CD players for your car, home, patio, person, etc. Many people use one iPod for multiple environments. The iPod targets a much wider demographic then the Walkmen, so we shouldn't be surprised to see bigger sales numbers.
I'm not trying to advocate iPod scratches or failed hard drives, but context is nice.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I don't think it's loonie.
I have bought FOUR 30 gig video ipods in the pat 15 months. Two for Xmas 2006 (gifts); one for myself in the fall of 2006 and still one more for Xmas 2006 (gift).
Now, I'm just one guy. But that's a whole lot of buying from just one guy. And while I'm different - I'm not *that* different. The number of white ear buds on the TTC when I take the bus or subway says to me: 100 million world wide? Entirely possible.
.Robert
Even with a failure rate of 10% (which is extraordinary), that is still 90m iPods sold.
I've had 4 non-iPod MP3 players and my failure rate was 100%. All four of them broke -- most shortly after their 90 day warrantee. Two of them were gifts to other people and I feel bad for not buying them iPods now. One was a Creative and the other three were off-brand.
Since then, I learned my lesson. I've bought an iPod Shuffle and more recently an iPod Nano. Both work just fine and the Shuffle is about 2.5 years old.
All I can say is if people here are wondering how many iPods get bought to replace broken ones, they should certainly question how many MP3 players are bought in general to replace other ones.
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.
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.