It does seem that the possibility has to be accounted for. Do we have any updated sales numbers? Or even estimates from those store-watching analysts?
I suspect it is a combination of both views. Sales could hardly be expected to keep up the torrid pace of the first few months (and the international rollouts have been completed, no?) and it is to be expected that production capacity would be expanded as needed over time. Anyway, I thought I would hit this before a troll can make it into an "issue."
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales. From the first week of its availability, 3 apps have been among the top 10 to 12 apps despite considerable week to week variation among the top 10 apps. These apps are: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. My hypothesis is that these are among the first 10 apps purchased after an iPad is bought. So the presence of these 3 apps is a surrogate for actual tracking of new iPad sales. If my hypothesis is correct, then when demand dries up, these apps will no longer be in the top 10, because fewer new iPads are being purchased. The current top 10 still has these 3 apps, so I doubt that demand has dried up.
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales. From the first week of its availability, 3 apps have been among the top 10 to 12 apps despite considerable week to week variation among the top 10 apps. These apps are: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. My hypothesis is that these are among the first 10 apps purchased after an iPad is bought. So the presence of these 3 apps is a surrogate for actual tracking of new iPad sales. If my hypothesis is correct, then when demand dries up, these apps will no longer be in the top 10, because fewer new iPads are being purchased. The current top 10 still has these 3 apps, so I doubt that demand has dried up.
Listen to this i can choose from a number of multitasking kernels for Microchips PIC processor and get fine multitasking. Can such a platform handke a cell ohone, possibly but it won't be an iPhone class device.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IOSWeekly
Well jail broken ipads can handle multitasking just fine - so I'm pretty sure if independent developers can do it easily enough, then apple isn't going to have any problem whatsoever enabling it,
With that you demonstrate a significany lack of knowledge of the issues being discussed. First iOS has akways multitasked, that is one of the reasons why Safari or mail starts up so fast. However we start to have problems when real significant apps are run jailbroken or not. The problem is pretty simple there is no paging or virtual memory for apps. This means apps can easily run out of memory. The features of iOS 4 strive to wirk around some of these issues but the fact remains they are attempting to deal with the lack of RAM.
Quote:
and enabling it well!
Well what does well mean. If well means running a bunch of tiny low memory impact apps then yeah a jailbroken device can do that. However that doesn't concern most people as they want to be able to run major apps with big data sets. Even Safari will bomb out if it hits a web site with a large amount of data.
In the end I just don't think you know what you are talking about or end up listening to hackers handing out misleading info. The whole point behind the quest for more RAM revolves around apps. For many there simply isn't enough RAM to implenent. For others simply working with modestly large data sets results in failures or crashes. This without any significant user muktitasking. Add a couple of background apps and your foreground app gets starved for RAM.
Consider this an app on tbe current iPad can have about 120MB of RAM to deal with. Depending on your point of view that can be a lot or to damn little. For example image editing would be a good app dimain for iPad but we have yet to see many serious image editors come to the platform. The tight limit on RAM is significant here, an issue that is again made worst with multitasking.
Don't think muktitasking (which iPad akrwady does) think viable user multitasking. Multitasking that doesn't take away from current capabilities. Plus we have the sad reality that some apps won't implement well simply due to the lack of RAM or paging.
In the end it comes back to that tiny PIC processor that can be tortured into multitasking. The problem is how serious are the "apps". Likewise the iPad always has multitasked but only single tasked for user apps. The problem is even the current iPad suffers from a lack of RAM. Be it a massive web page or a huge PDF iPads fail regularly to open user data.
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales. From the first week of its availability, 3 apps have been among the top 10 to 12 apps despite considerable week to week variation among the top 10 apps. These apps are: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. My hypothesis is that these are among the first 10 apps purchased after an iPad is bought. So the presence of these 3 apps is a surrogate for actual tracking of new iPad sales. If my hypothesis is correct, then when demand dries up, these apps will no longer be in the top 10, because fewer new iPads are being purchased. The current top 10 still has these 3 apps, so I doubt that demand has dried up.
Beyound that if sales really has dried up we would see expansion into other markets.
If anything is happening it is probably due to waiting on the new iPods. That would be very short term as a month and a half after that Christmas shopping begins. Personally I'm hoping for a September bump of iPad along with the rest of the lineup.
Which brings up another item, if you are one of those Christmas shoppers i think you have a very narrow window for success. Demand could sky rocket as the various holidays start.
Shall I point you in the direction of the iPhone 3GS? A device with an inferior CPU and similar ram? Multitasks just fine.
As it is, Safari on iPad can't remember pages very well, switching between open web pages means reloading and rerendering the first web page when you return back to it. If I was working on a web post, I would specifically need to take care to copy my text if I needed to double check my research on another page, so I don't loose it when I switched back to my post. That's pretty clumsy in my opinion.
Quote:
I don't think apple is holding off 4.0 for iPad because of lack of hardware - it's just that they are cooking up something a bit special for the iPad version - I'm picking Safari is in for some big changes. And folders will probably look quite different also.
We had this discussion a few weeks ago, something about testing the API on the different screen form factor, the UI is similar but different in many subtle respects. A lot of the apps are presented and controlled very differently from what is on the iPhone and Touch devices too.
Improvements to Safari would be nice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Really; should i be impressed?
Listen to this i can choose from a number of multitasking kernels for Microchips PIC processor and get fine multitasking. Can such a platform handke a cell ohone, possibly but it won't be an iPhone class device.
Yes, a PIC can do it, it doesn't take much to make rudimentary multitasking run on a PIC, though it's somewhat limited. Also, Cocoa's graphical and object oriented programming seems to take a lot of hardware resources.
Anyways, yes, iPhones had multitasking all along, all the circuitry necessary was there, but they didn't want to expose anything like the full preemptive type to developers. Battery life is kind of touchy on smart phones, and the lower memory space of the older models didn't help.
What truely amazes me is just how good iPad is for a rev one device from Apple...
Agree.
It is ver 1.0, but not really. And it doesn't feel like ver 1.0, either. I've been a big believer in waiting for ver 3.0 before getting anything in tech-land, but strangely didn't feel like I needed to follow that when I pre-ordered the iPad. I challenged myself on that point before pre-ordering, and found it wasn't much of an issue. I had to examine why. I'm not an early adopter, and still am not.
It's a new form factor, but I guessed that Apple leveraged a ton of related experience from the iPod Touch and iPhone, and somehow they leapt ahead of ver 1.0 and even ver 2.0 hiccups (we can quibble on what the numbers and hiccups should be...)
I expect the 2nd and (more so) the 3rd generation iPads will be amazing, but I have no regrets having gotten ver 1.0. But -- let's be honest -- if I find I must have the 2nd or 3rd gen iPad, then one of my tech-challenged female relatives will get a free iPad ver 1.0 (Hi Mom! Hope you like black.)
The apps value proposition will likely prove more so as time goes on. I recall getting the 3G iPhone and loading up on apps from the freshly-launched App Store (it's not a real iPhone until you've been to the App Store and done loaded up). The apps were more than I expected, but you could sense that this was new, that app developers were going to go wild once they figured this out, and that it would be something amazing in a year's time. We had an idea that that may be so back then, but, really, we didn't have an idea. I think the iPad and its apps are at that same stage -- we know they'll be amazing in 1-3 year's time, but the reality will exceed our early expectations.
I would say the demand has dried up. Not that my experience is hard data, but I have an iPad and four other people I know have iPads. We all bought them in the first month...I have yet to meet anyone else who has bought an iPad since...
Hmm... The iPad is barely just reaching supply-demand balance in the 10-15 initial-launch countries, there are still at least 30-50 countries for the iPad and iPhone4 to be launched. Remember, these other markets will contribute strongly to Apple's profit, revenue and unit sales. Some more than others of course, but remember these 60 to 70 countries in aggregate are what give record total sales of Macs and iPhone 3G/S quarter after quarter.
Demand is still massive, Apple is still trying to keep up, and iPad and iPhone4 has still a lot more of the GLOBAL market to conquer, Apple still has to ramp up production even more if they can. They are doing the best they can without quality going to the dogs.
I would say the demand has dried up. Not that my experience is hard data, but I have an iPad and four other people I know have iPads. We all bought them in the first month...I have yet to meet anyone else who has bought an iPad since...
Demand has not "dried up". It just means in the US it has reached a supply-demand balance, but remember the huge demand OUTSIDE the US which contributes largely to Apple's success.
Please, just because the US is showing 24hours doesn't mean suddenly, oh, "demand has dried up".
After struggling to meet consumer demand for the iPad since it launched in April, estimated shipping times for new online orders have improved to within 24 hours, suggesting any production problems have been resolved.
New orders for the Wi-Fi-only and 3G-capable iPad, in all available storage capacities, now ship within 24 hours when purchased from Apple's official online store.
For months, customers had to wait an estimated 7 to 10 days for their order to ship. A few weeks ago, iPad shipping times quietly improved to between 3 and 5 days.
The estimated 24 hour shipping schedule would suggest that Apple has managed to catch up with consumer demand for the iPad, which has been a multi-million seller in its first few months on the market. Apple struggled to meet demand, as various component suppliers could not get orders to the company fast enough.
In its first three months of availability, the iPad sold 3.27 million units. Officials with Apple admitted that they were caught off guard by the high demand for the product.
Strong initial demand for the iPad even forced Apple to delay the international launch of its touchscreen tablet by a month. Instead, the device launched in a number of overseas countries at the end of May.
Apple has made strides but it is nowhere close to meeting international demand. iPad is only officially available in 10-15 countries.
This is really infuriating. I know Apple and many Apple blogs/news sites are US-oriented, but you really gotta look at the big picture, especially if you are trying to understand Apple better.
Think about the number of iPads Apple has sold so far. Now double that, that's how much they need to sell in the next month should they launch in more countries, especially countries where Mac and iPhone sales do happen at a reasonable pace.
I'm not bashing Apple here, like I said, they have made good strides, but remember they have to now stockpile at least the *total amount they have already sold*, ie. about 5 to 10 million, to fully supply iPads to at least where Macs are officially sold, particularly leading into Oct-Dec which is the best year for Apple products *around the world*. So if Apple is doing about 3 million iPads per month, and production still needs to be ramped up, we're looking at about 18 to 20 million iPads sold in total by the end of 2010.
Apple really can't win, can they? Not enough - apple have messed up. Ramp up manufacture to meet demand - obviously no one wants one. It's still 7 days here in the uk, and my local reseller was sold out with a three week delay when I went to get another one this morning. Guy behind counter said they were selling out as soon as they could get them in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 0yvind
The international rollouts have NOT been completeted. We still can't buy them in Scandinavia (I see lots of Norwegians have them on cafes or trains, but they've bought them abroad). I tried when in France in June but it was a ten days wait then. Someone at the Apple store in London told a friend of mine they would start selling them in Norway in September. So still haven't got mine (would very much prefer a 7" one though)...
Thank you for the important international observations. If Scandinavia even doesn't have them, what to think of Asia? Only very few countries in Asia have them officially, but like everyone in places outside the official-launch countries, you see iPads quite frequently from early adopters that bought iPads from the grey market, and everybody is dying for the official launches to get quality stock and decent local prices and proper warranty coverage.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cubert
So, how many sold will Steve Jobs announce on Wednesday?
My guess is 5 million as of August 31st.
Between 5 to 10 million is my guess. Assuming about at least 3 million per month for Oct to Dec, we're looking at 15 to 20 million sold in total for 2010.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IOSWeekly
Well jail broken ipads can handle multitasking just fine - so I'm pretty sure if independent developers can do it easily enough, then apple isn't going to have any problem whatsoever enabling it, and enabling it well!
I reckon iOS 4 for iPad with multitasking will be quite nice. I'm sure tabbed web browsing is probably a hugely-demanded feature, maybe Apple can pull it off (yes they have to do some major rework on the caching mechanism in Safari to enable this).
I think iOS 4 is taking quite long for iPad is because they want to deliver a solid OS and hardware experience going into the 10 million units they would sell during the Oct to Dec quarter. Multitasking, tabbed browsing perhaps, all smooth and nice as per iOS 3.2 for iPad... will truly cement iPad as the killer international gadget-of-the-year for 2010.
256MB RAM is a definite limitation but that's why it's taking iOS 4 a bit longer than it should perhaps, they're optimising everything because I don't think there will be a 512MB RAM version until early next year, they have got to get iOS 4 right on the current models of iPad, of which as I mention, they need to make about 10 million more this year alone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Beyound that if sales really has dried up we would see expansion into other markets... If anything is happening it is probably due to waiting on the new iPods. That would be very short term as a month and a half after that Christmas shopping begins. Personally I'm hoping for a September bump of iPad along with the rest of the lineup... Which brings up another item, if you are one of those Christmas shoppers i think you have a very narrow window for success. Demand could sky rocket as the various holidays start.
Expansion into other markets is, I'm sure, definitely planned for and as I mention, Apple is stockpiling units to go big into major markets. I think they're not going to wait until sales dry up in current launch countries, they need to haul ass to cover a lot more of the global market. Yes, with the holiday season approaching they need to ramp everything and work as a very well-oiled machine to deliver Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads and even iTV to global markets. It will be tough to keep things running smoothly, but Oct-Dec 2010 will be yet another all time record for Apple, and they need to take this momentum right into 2011 to give them the R&D latitude to deliver the next big things in 2012.
I really can't say much on what Steve Jobs is like personally, but professionally, he is probably the only one that can steer this ship confidently over the next few years. I wish him the best of mental, physical and spiritual health. I do hope though at the same time they are grooming everyone as much as possible to rise to the occasion, not as something stressful and unsustainable, but with grace and intelligence.
Demand has not "dried up". It just means in the US it has reached a supply-demand balance, but remember the huge demand OUTSIDE the US which contributes largely to Apple's success.
Please, just because the US is showing 24hours doesn't mean suddenly, oh, "demand has dried up".
Sure it does. If Apple can't meet demand, it's a problem. If Apple can meet demand, that's an even bigger problem. Either way, Apple fails. How dare you challenge this logic?
Sure it does. If Apple can't meet demand, it's a problem. If Apple can meet demand, that's an even bigger problem. Either way, Apple fails. How dare you challenge this logic?
Listen to this i can choose from a number of multitasking kernels for Microchips PIC processor and get fine multitasking. Can such a platform handke a cell ohone, possibly but it won't be an iPhone class device.
With that you demonstrate a significany lack of knowledge of the issues being discussed. First iOS has akways multitasked, that is one of the reasons why Safari or mail starts up so fast. However we start to have problems when real significant apps are run jailbroken or not. The problem is pretty simple there is no paging or virtual memory for apps. This means apps can easily run out of memory. The features of iOS 4 strive to wirk around some of these issues but the fact remains they are attempting to deal with the lack of RAM.
Well what does well mean. If well means running a bunch of tiny low memory impact apps then yeah a jailbroken device can do that. However that doesn't concern most people as they want to be able to run major apps with big data sets. Even Safari will bomb out if it hits a web site with a large amount of data.
In the end I just don't think you know what you are talking about or end up listening to hackers handing out misleading info. The whole point behind the quest for more RAM revolves around apps. For many there simply isn't enough RAM to implenent. For others simply working with modestly large data sets results in failures or crashes. This without any significant user muktitasking. Add a couple of background apps and your foreground app gets starved for RAM.
Consider this an app on tbe current iPad can have about 120MB of RAM to deal with. Depending on your point of view that can be a lot or to damn little. For example image editing would be a good app dimain for iPad but we have yet to see many serious image editors come to the platform. The tight limit on RAM is significant here, an issue that is again made worst with multitasking.
Don't think muktitasking (which iPad akrwady does) think viable user multitasking. Multitasking that doesn't take away from current capabilities. Plus we have the sad reality that some apps won't implement well simply due to the lack of RAM or paging.
In the end it comes back to that tiny PIC processor that can be tortured into multitasking. The problem is how serious are the "apps". Likewise the iPad always has multitasked but only single tasked for user apps. The problem is even the current iPad suffers from a lack of RAM. Be it a massive web page or a huge PDF iPads fail regularly to open user data.
Dave
What are you talking about??? if you think apple isn't going to enable multitasking on the
ipad, then you seriously are out of touch with reality.
Anyways, I guess we'll see in the next couple of months whether your amazingly well informed opinion, that flys in the face of everything apple has so far said about iOS 4 for iPad, is correct or not.
I would love to scour the archives of this site for the usual names denigrating the ipad. Those same people who said it would crash and burn, had no place in the market and would struggle to sell are now those same people complaining about the perceived lack of functionality based on their interpretation of what the product should be.
These people never learn, and as we pass five MILLION units sold before the international rollout is even half way done, these trolls instead criticise people for daring to like this 'flawed' product. Apparently the millions of us who own one are simply apple fan bois too stupid to realise their experience is 'flawed'.
So many people have bought this and loved it. If people buy a product and it isn't fit for purpose, they return it. They don't blindly continue to use it and waste time complaining. That's not what any dissatisfied customer does.
And yet there are people on this site who don't own one, don't understand it's purpose and not only criticise the product, but the millions of those who have bought it and dare to like it.
Maybe it's because the product is already over half a year old (counting from the announcement) and rumors about a new version are growing? It's just recently released here in the Netherlands. If it was released in April (or if I could get one (16GB 3G) at the store the first weekend :P) I would have bought it, now I'd rather wait for the next generation...
Comments
...or that demand has dried up.
It does seem that the possibility has to be accounted for. Do we have any updated sales numbers? Or even estimates from those store-watching analysts?
I suspect it is a combination of both views. Sales could hardly be expected to keep up the torrid pace of the first few months (and the international rollouts have been completed, no?) and it is to be expected that production capacity would be expanded as needed over time. Anyway, I thought I would hit this before a troll can make it into an "issue."
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales. From the first week of its availability, 3 apps have been among the top 10 to 12 apps despite considerable week to week variation among the top 10 apps. These apps are: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. My hypothesis is that these are among the first 10 apps purchased after an iPad is bought. So the presence of these 3 apps is a surrogate for actual tracking of new iPad sales. If my hypothesis is correct, then when demand dries up, these apps will no longer be in the top 10, because fewer new iPads are being purchased. The current top 10 still has these 3 apps, so I doubt that demand has dried up.
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales. From the first week of its availability, 3 apps have been among the top 10 to 12 apps despite considerable week to week variation among the top 10 apps. These apps are: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. My hypothesis is that these are among the first 10 apps purchased after an iPad is bought. So the presence of these 3 apps is a surrogate for actual tracking of new iPad sales. If my hypothesis is correct, then when demand dries up, these apps will no longer be in the top 10, because fewer new iPads are being purchased. The current top 10 still has these 3 apps, so I doubt that demand has dried up.
Good call.
Listen to this i can choose from a number of multitasking kernels for Microchips PIC processor and get fine multitasking. Can such a platform handke a cell ohone, possibly but it won't be an iPhone class device.
Well jail broken ipads can handle multitasking just fine - so I'm pretty sure if independent developers can do it easily enough, then apple isn't going to have any problem whatsoever enabling it,
With that you demonstrate a significany lack of knowledge of the issues being discussed. First iOS has akways multitasked, that is one of the reasons why Safari or mail starts up so fast. However we start to have problems when real significant apps are run jailbroken or not. The problem is pretty simple there is no paging or virtual memory for apps. This means apps can easily run out of memory. The features of iOS 4 strive to wirk around some of these issues but the fact remains they are attempting to deal with the lack of RAM.
and enabling it well!
Well what does well mean. If well means running a bunch of tiny low memory impact apps then yeah a jailbroken device can do that. However that doesn't concern most people as they want to be able to run major apps with big data sets. Even Safari will bomb out if it hits a web site with a large amount of data.
In the end I just don't think you know what you are talking about or end up listening to hackers handing out misleading info. The whole point behind the quest for more RAM revolves around apps. For many there simply isn't enough RAM to implenent. For others simply working with modestly large data sets results in failures or crashes. This without any significant user muktitasking. Add a couple of background apps and your foreground app gets starved for RAM.
Consider this an app on tbe current iPad can have about 120MB of RAM to deal with. Depending on your point of view that can be a lot or to damn little. For example image editing would be a good app dimain for iPad but we have yet to see many serious image editors come to the platform. The tight limit on RAM is significant here, an issue that is again made worst with multitasking.
Don't think muktitasking (which iPad akrwady does) think viable user multitasking. Multitasking that doesn't take away from current capabilities. Plus we have the sad reality that some apps won't implement well simply due to the lack of RAM or paging.
In the end it comes back to that tiny PIC processor that can be tortured into multitasking. The problem is how serious are the "apps". Likewise the iPad always has multitasked but only single tasked for user apps. The problem is even the current iPad suffers from a lack of RAM. Be it a massive web page or a huge PDF iPads fail regularly to open user data.
Dave
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales. From the first week of its availability, 3 apps have been among the top 10 to 12 apps despite considerable week to week variation among the top 10 apps. These apps are: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. My hypothesis is that these are among the first 10 apps purchased after an iPad is bought. So the presence of these 3 apps is a surrogate for actual tracking of new iPad sales. If my hypothesis is correct, then when demand dries up, these apps will no longer be in the top 10, because fewer new iPads are being purchased. The current top 10 still has these 3 apps, so I doubt that demand has dried up.
Beyound that if sales really has dried up we would see expansion into other markets.
If anything is happening it is probably due to waiting on the new iPods. That would be very short term as a month and a half after that Christmas shopping begins. Personally I'm hoping for a September bump of iPad along with the rest of the lineup.
Which brings up another item, if you are one of those Christmas shoppers i think you have a very narrow window for success. Demand could sky rocket as the various holidays start.
Eh? Lack of ram for multitasking?
Shall I point you in the direction of the iPhone 3GS? A device with an inferior CPU and similar ram? Multitasks just fine.
As it is, Safari on iPad can't remember pages very well, switching between open web pages means reloading and rerendering the first web page when you return back to it. If I was working on a web post, I would specifically need to take care to copy my text if I needed to double check my research on another page, so I don't loose it when I switched back to my post. That's pretty clumsy in my opinion.
I don't think apple is holding off 4.0 for iPad because of lack of hardware - it's just that they are cooking up something a bit special for the iPad version - I'm picking Safari is in for some big changes. And folders will probably look quite different also.
We had this discussion a few weeks ago, something about testing the API on the different screen form factor, the UI is similar but different in many subtle respects. A lot of the apps are presented and controlled very differently from what is on the iPhone and Touch devices too.
Improvements to Safari would be nice.
Really; should i be impressed?
Listen to this i can choose from a number of multitasking kernels for Microchips PIC processor and get fine multitasking. Can such a platform handke a cell ohone, possibly but it won't be an iPhone class device.
Yes, a PIC can do it, it doesn't take much to make rudimentary multitasking run on a PIC, though it's somewhat limited. Also, Cocoa's graphical and object oriented programming seems to take a lot of hardware resources.
Anyways, yes, iPhones had multitasking all along, all the circuitry necessary was there, but they didn't want to expose anything like the full preemptive type to developers. Battery life is kind of touchy on smart phones, and the lower memory space of the older models didn't help.
I have a hypothesis regarding how to track demand and sales...
I like it!
My guess is 5 million as of August 31st.
What truely amazes me is just how good iPad is for a rev one device from Apple...
Agree.
It is ver 1.0, but not really. And it doesn't feel like ver 1.0, either. I've been a big believer in waiting for ver 3.0 before getting anything in tech-land, but strangely didn't feel like I needed to follow that when I pre-ordered the iPad. I challenged myself on that point before pre-ordering, and found it wasn't much of an issue. I had to examine why. I'm not an early adopter, and still am not.
It's a new form factor, but I guessed that Apple leveraged a ton of related experience from the iPod Touch and iPhone, and somehow they leapt ahead of ver 1.0 and even ver 2.0 hiccups (we can quibble on what the numbers and hiccups should be...)
I expect the 2nd and (more so) the 3rd generation iPads will be amazing, but I have no regrets having gotten ver 1.0. But -- let's be honest -- if I find I must have the 2nd or 3rd gen iPad, then one of my tech-challenged female relatives will get a free iPad ver 1.0 (Hi Mom! Hope you like black.)
The apps value proposition will likely prove more so as time goes on. I recall getting the 3G iPhone and loading up on apps from the freshly-launched App Store (it's not a real iPhone until you've been to the App Store and done loaded up). The apps were more than I expected, but you could sense that this was new, that app developers were going to go wild once they figured this out, and that it would be something amazing in a year's time. We had an idea that that may be so back then, but, really, we didn't have an idea. I think the iPad and its apps are at that same stage -- we know they'll be amazing in 1-3 year's time, but the reality will exceed our early expectations.
Demand is still massive, Apple is still trying to keep up, and iPad and iPhone4 has still a lot more of the GLOBAL market to conquer, Apple still has to ramp up production even more if they can. They are doing the best they can without quality going to the dogs.
I would say the demand has dried up. Not that my experience is hard data, but I have an iPad and four other people I know have iPads. We all bought them in the first month...I have yet to meet anyone else who has bought an iPad since...
Demand has not "dried up". It just means in the US it has reached a supply-demand balance, but remember the huge demand OUTSIDE the US which contributes largely to Apple's success.
Please, just because the US is showing 24hours doesn't mean suddenly, oh, "demand has dried up".
After struggling to meet consumer demand for the iPad since it launched in April, estimated shipping times for new online orders have improved to within 24 hours, suggesting any production problems have been resolved.
New orders for the Wi-Fi-only and 3G-capable iPad, in all available storage capacities, now ship within 24 hours when purchased from Apple's official online store.
For months, customers had to wait an estimated 7 to 10 days for their order to ship. A few weeks ago, iPad shipping times quietly improved to between 3 and 5 days.
The estimated 24 hour shipping schedule would suggest that Apple has managed to catch up with consumer demand for the iPad, which has been a multi-million seller in its first few months on the market. Apple struggled to meet demand, as various component suppliers could not get orders to the company fast enough.
In its first three months of availability, the iPad sold 3.27 million units. Officials with Apple admitted that they were caught off guard by the high demand for the product.
Strong initial demand for the iPad even forced Apple to delay the international launch of its touchscreen tablet by a month. Instead, the device launched in a number of overseas countries at the end of May.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Apple has made strides but it is nowhere close to meeting international demand. iPad is only officially available in 10-15 countries.
This is really infuriating. I know Apple and many Apple blogs/news sites are US-oriented, but you really gotta look at the big picture, especially if you are trying to understand Apple better.
Think about the number of iPads Apple has sold so far. Now double that, that's how much they need to sell in the next month should they launch in more countries, especially countries where Mac and iPhone sales do happen at a reasonable pace.
I'm not bashing Apple here, like I said, they have made good strides, but remember they have to now stockpile at least the *total amount they have already sold*, ie. about 5 to 10 million, to fully supply iPads to at least where Macs are officially sold, particularly leading into Oct-Dec which is the best year for Apple products *around the world*. So if Apple is doing about 3 million iPads per month, and production still needs to be ramped up, we're looking at about 18 to 20 million iPads sold in total by the end of 2010.
Apple really can't win, can they? Not enough - apple have messed up. Ramp up manufacture to meet demand - obviously no one wants one. It's still 7 days here in the uk, and my local reseller was sold out with a three week delay when I went to get another one this morning. Guy behind counter said they were selling out as soon as they could get them in.
The international rollouts have NOT been completeted. We still can't buy them in Scandinavia (I see lots of Norwegians have them on cafes or trains, but they've bought them abroad). I tried when in France in June but it was a ten days wait then. Someone at the Apple store in London told a friend of mine they would start selling them in Norway in September. So still haven't got mine (would very much prefer a 7" one though)...
Thank you for the important international observations. If Scandinavia even doesn't have them, what to think of Asia? Only very few countries in Asia have them officially, but like everyone in places outside the official-launch countries, you see iPads quite frequently from early adopters that bought iPads from the grey market, and everybody is dying for the official launches to get quality stock and decent local prices and proper warranty coverage.
So, how many sold will Steve Jobs announce on Wednesday?
My guess is 5 million as of August 31st.
Between 5 to 10 million is my guess. Assuming about at least 3 million per month for Oct to Dec, we're looking at 15 to 20 million sold in total for 2010.
Well jail broken ipads can handle multitasking just fine - so I'm pretty sure if independent developers can do it easily enough, then apple isn't going to have any problem whatsoever enabling it, and enabling it well!
I reckon iOS 4 for iPad with multitasking will be quite nice. I'm sure tabbed web browsing is probably a hugely-demanded feature, maybe Apple can pull it off (yes they have to do some major rework on the caching mechanism in Safari to enable this).
I think iOS 4 is taking quite long for iPad is because they want to deliver a solid OS and hardware experience going into the 10 million units they would sell during the Oct to Dec quarter. Multitasking, tabbed browsing perhaps, all smooth and nice as per iOS 3.2 for iPad... will truly cement iPad as the killer international gadget-of-the-year for 2010.
256MB RAM is a definite limitation but that's why it's taking iOS 4 a bit longer than it should perhaps, they're optimising everything because I don't think there will be a 512MB RAM version until early next year, they have got to get iOS 4 right on the current models of iPad, of which as I mention, they need to make about 10 million more this year alone.
Beyound that if sales really has dried up we would see expansion into other markets... If anything is happening it is probably due to waiting on the new iPods. That would be very short term as a month and a half after that Christmas shopping begins. Personally I'm hoping for a September bump of iPad along with the rest of the lineup... Which brings up another item, if you are one of those Christmas shoppers i think you have a very narrow window for success. Demand could sky rocket as the various holidays start.
Expansion into other markets is, I'm sure, definitely planned for and as I mention, Apple is stockpiling units to go big into major markets. I think they're not going to wait until sales dry up in current launch countries, they need to haul ass to cover a lot more of the global market. Yes, with the holiday season approaching they need to ramp everything and work as a very well-oiled machine to deliver Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads and even iTV to global markets. It will be tough to keep things running smoothly, but Oct-Dec 2010 will be yet another all time record for Apple, and they need to take this momentum right into 2011 to give them the R&D latitude to deliver the next big things in 2012.
I really can't say much on what Steve Jobs is like personally, but professionally, he is probably the only one that can steer this ship confidently over the next few years. I wish him the best of mental, physical and spiritual health. I do hope though at the same time they are grooming everyone as much as possible to rise to the occasion, not as something stressful and unsustainable, but with grace and intelligence.
Demand has not "dried up". It just means in the US it has reached a supply-demand balance, but remember the huge demand OUTSIDE the US which contributes largely to Apple's success.
Please, just because the US is showing 24hours doesn't mean suddenly, oh, "demand has dried up".
Sure it does. If Apple can't meet demand, it's a problem. If Apple can meet demand, that's an even bigger problem. Either way, Apple fails. How dare you challenge this logic?
Sure it does. If Apple can't meet demand, it's a problem. If Apple can meet demand, that's an even bigger problem. Either way, Apple fails. How dare you challenge this logic?
Really; should i be impressed?
Listen to this i can choose from a number of multitasking kernels for Microchips PIC processor and get fine multitasking. Can such a platform handke a cell ohone, possibly but it won't be an iPhone class device.
With that you demonstrate a significany lack of knowledge of the issues being discussed. First iOS has akways multitasked, that is one of the reasons why Safari or mail starts up so fast. However we start to have problems when real significant apps are run jailbroken or not. The problem is pretty simple there is no paging or virtual memory for apps. This means apps can easily run out of memory. The features of iOS 4 strive to wirk around some of these issues but the fact remains they are attempting to deal with the lack of RAM.
Well what does well mean. If well means running a bunch of tiny low memory impact apps then yeah a jailbroken device can do that. However that doesn't concern most people as they want to be able to run major apps with big data sets. Even Safari will bomb out if it hits a web site with a large amount of data.
In the end I just don't think you know what you are talking about or end up listening to hackers handing out misleading info. The whole point behind the quest for more RAM revolves around apps. For many there simply isn't enough RAM to implenent. For others simply working with modestly large data sets results in failures or crashes. This without any significant user muktitasking. Add a couple of background apps and your foreground app gets starved for RAM.
Consider this an app on tbe current iPad can have about 120MB of RAM to deal with. Depending on your point of view that can be a lot or to damn little. For example image editing would be a good app dimain for iPad but we have yet to see many serious image editors come to the platform. The tight limit on RAM is significant here, an issue that is again made worst with multitasking.
Don't think muktitasking (which iPad akrwady does) think viable user multitasking. Multitasking that doesn't take away from current capabilities. Plus we have the sad reality that some apps won't implement well simply due to the lack of RAM or paging.
In the end it comes back to that tiny PIC processor that can be tortured into multitasking. The problem is how serious are the "apps". Likewise the iPad always has multitasked but only single tasked for user apps. The problem is even the current iPad suffers from a lack of RAM. Be it a massive web page or a huge PDF iPads fail regularly to open user data.
Dave
What are you talking about??? if you think apple isn't going to enable multitasking on the
ipad, then you seriously are out of touch with reality.
Anyways, I guess we'll see in the next couple of months whether your amazingly well informed opinion, that flys in the face of everything apple has so far said about iOS 4 for iPad, is correct or not.
These people never learn, and as we pass five MILLION units sold before the international rollout is even half way done, these trolls instead criticise people for daring to like this 'flawed' product. Apparently the millions of us who own one are simply apple fan bois too stupid to realise their experience is 'flawed'.
So many people have bought this and loved it. If people buy a product and it isn't fit for purpose, they return it. They don't blindly continue to use it and waste time complaining. That's not what any dissatisfied customer does.
And yet there are people on this site who don't own one, don't understand it's purpose and not only criticise the product, but the millions of those who have bought it and dare to like it.
Crazy.
Sales could hardly be expected to keep up the torrid pace of the first few months (and the international rollouts have been completed, no?)
Not yet, there are still countries where the iPhone is available (3GS) but the iPad is not.