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100 Million iPods

Posted by samzenpus on from the that's-a-lot-of-music dept.

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."

4 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. "Sold" probably includes them all by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Generally the management of these numbers is designed to make sales numbers look good. There is nothing stopping warantee replacement units being reflected as a zero-dollar sale, so long as you don't mess with the actual revenue numbers.

    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.
  2. A bit of perspective by remove+office · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. The value of good user interface design... by The+Media+Mechanic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  4. Hmm by chebucto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.