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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."
"No wireless. More space than a Zune. Lame."
- CmdrBallmer
No wireless. Less space than 100 million nomads. Lame.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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?)
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.
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.
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.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all iPods are created equal."
I have a dream that my iPods will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their case but by the content of their hard drive.
Let music ring.
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.
Cammas have, another use, to indicate, a pause. You are, William Shatner, AICMFP.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
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.
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LOAD "SIG",8,1
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.
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...
There was a single comma in the entire summary. It wasn't really used correctly, but it really shouldn't have taken you four tries to understand.
Well, now I know how to obfusticate any sensitive documentation. Just insert commas where they don't belong and a certain proportion of slashdot readers will waste valuable brain cycles attempting to decipher it. Whereas my loyal minions, having simpler brains, will ignore any and all punctuation marks and will implement my open source doomsday devices first.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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That's a coincidence, I found mine on an Air France flight!
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
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). :)
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...
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.