A Hundred Million iPods!

Back in January, 2004, Apple released a press statement trumpeting the fact that it had sold over two million iPods. Neat. A year later, it bragged that it had sold ten million of 'em. Even more impressive.

And today, it's telling the world that it's sold a hundred million iPods since the first one appeared a bit over five years ago, which it says makes its iconic little gadgets the fastest-growing music players in history. (I'm assuming that it's including music players of all sorts in there, including Walkmans (Walkmen?); it's kind of a given that the iPods has been a tad more successful than any digital audio player with another company's logo on it.)

The Apple press release has an aw-shucks sound bite from Steve Jobs about how the company is pleased to help folks rediscover their music, and also quotes Mary J. Blige, John Mayer, and Lance Armstrong (fascinating fact: Lance likes to listen to music when he runs) and doesn't otherwise have much to say other than obvious factoids about iPods, iTunes, and another Apple music product it's going to release later this year (apparently the company plans to release a phone--who knew?).

Some of the things I'd like to know about those sales probably won't show up in any Apple statement. Such as....

* How many of those 100,000,000 iPods are sitting in drawers?

* How many broke and were replaced by other iPods?

* What's the exact figure of how many iPods have been lost (I once left mine on an Air France flight) or stolen?

* How many cumulative scratches are there on all those iPods?

* What are the total number of songs stored on the 100,000,000 iPods, and how many were bought from Apple, ripped from CD, downloaded from P2P networks, etc., etc.?

* How long will it take Apple to get to 200,000,000 iPods, assuming that it does, eventually? 300,000,000? A half a billion?

Okay, enough wondering. I leave you with a poll....

Comments

As for the number of songs on the iPods purchased through the ITMS store, I guess, Steve Jobs was mentioning something like 3% (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/). That means most of the music played on the iPods was not sold by the Apple Inc. Hardware is always the precious :)). Cheers, Radek.

blatny

April 11, 2007

10:43 AM PT

I have an iPod Nano and it has never held a music file. It's 100% free podcasts.

scientaestubique

April 11, 2007

3:43 PM PT