On Friday, Apple began taking pre-orders for the iPad, and according to an estimate done by the AAPL Sanity Team, nearly 120,000 iPads was sold on the first day alone.
You can see more details on how they came up with that number at Deagol’s blog, but basically, looking at order numbers from a sampling of 99 orders over 19.5 hours, the team subtracted the number of typical daily online sales from the total estimated sales from Friday.
In addition, the team finds that the pre-orders were nearly equally split among the 16, 32 and 64 GB models, with almost 70% of the pre-orders going to the WiFi-only iPads.
As Victor Castroll, an analyst with Valcent Financial Group pointed out, “Apple has been able to generate over $75 million in revenue in one day on a product that 99.9% of purchasers haven’t touched or for that matter, even seen in person.”
How about some perspective … is 120,000 good, bad … what?
Apple was estimated to have sold around 200,000 1st gen iPhones on the first day from physical stores in the US. While the iPad got about 120,000 online pre-orders on the first day. Yeah, I'd say the iPad is doing very well.
"Apple Stores sold an estimated 128,000 iPhones on the first day, while AT&T stores sold 72,000, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with San Francisco-based Global Equities."
Perspective:
"HTC CEO Peter Chou has come out and stated that the Nexus One is doing well. The handset hasn’t exactly been tearing up the sales charts though with reports that the device only moved 135,000 units in the first 74 days it was available."