Apple said Monday morning that it sold more than 300,000 iPads in the United States on the device’s first day of sales on Saturday. The sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Stores.
Once people got their hands on iPads, they were busy. Users downloaded over a million apps from the AppStore and over 250,000 e-books from the new iBookstore during the first day.
“It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world — it’s going to be a game changer,” said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs in a statement. “iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad.”
A survey of first-day buyers by Piper Jaffray, a Wall Street investment bank, showed that 74 percent of iPad buyers own Macs and 66 percent own iPhones. That was based on a survey of 448 iPad buyers in New York and Minneapolis. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray estimated that first-weekend sales of the iPad would top 600,000 to 700,000 units and that first-year sales would be above 5.6 million units.
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Those numbers aren’t huge for a first-day sale of an Apple gadget, but analysts have said that the company will have a tougher time selling iPads because, as a tablet computer, it is a brand new category of device. It’s worth remembering that 300,000 units sold at $499 is at least $150 million in retail revenue, not counting the money from the apps. If you look at it that way, it’s a considerable amount of cash that consumers spent on this device. Also, it’s also worth seeing what the second day and first week sales numbers are going to be.
