Apple sells more than 300,000 iPads on day of debut
Over 300,000 iPads were sold in the US by the end of Saturday, says Apple. The figure represents a combination of online orders, sales at Apple Stores and deliveries to “channel partners,” meaning Best Buy and smaller resellers. Apple also notes that over 1 million apps were downloaded in the same day, along with over 250,000 books from the iBookstore. This translates to an average of three apps and somewhat less than one book per person.
While generally good news for Apple, app developers and the publishing industry, the sales are well below a predicted level from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, which called for as many as 600,000 to 700,000 units. Supply problems may be constraining the company, however, meaning that it may not have even had that many units to last the weekend. Partway through pre-orders the company switched the delivery date to April 12th.
Apple’s iPad comes at a time when people have even more Internet-connected gadgets — smart phones, laptops, e-book readers, video entertainment, set-top boxes and home broadband connections — and it may need to work harder to persuade people to buy yet another device that serves many of the same purposes. For movie and video lovers, there are many companies have already developed such DVD to iPad converter and Video to iPad Converter to help them convert DVDs and video into iPad compatible files on Mac, including Snow Leopard. People can download those program for free trial and enjoy the video on the iPad anywhere and anytime.
Apple also said Monday that new iPad owners downloaded more than a million applications and more than 250,000 electronic books from its iTunes store on Saturday.
