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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."
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.
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.
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.