Apple to sell 1 million iPads in just two weeks

by Stevie Smith - Mar 15 2010, 13:57

With iPad pre-orders officially opened on Friday of last week, it would appear that customer anticipation is certainly high for Apple’s trend-leading tablet computer as its April 03 street date looms.

More pointedly, initial pre-order estimates offered up by the dedicated watchers over at Apple Insider suggest that Cupertino-based Apple Inc. managed to secure some 120,000 iPad pre-orders during the device’s opening 24 hours on the market.

Citing the AAPL Sanity Board at Investor Village, the Insider report also claims the multi-touch tablet computer enjoyed immediate impact with prospective buyers, who snapped up 51,000 units in the first two hours of pre-order availability.

If ongoing pre-order figures and launch sale projections from Investor Village are anything to go by, Apple can expect to shift a full 1 million iPad units by the end of the device’s second week on store shelves.

Should that level of retail performance be awaiting Apple’s iconic iPad, it will represent a significant upsurge when compared against initial Wall Street estimates that had suggested Apple would require a full year of sales to scale that particular peak.

With 120,000 units supposedly already marked and ready to go, two-thirds of which are thought to be Wi-Fi models, the current pre-order “guesstimate” offered by Venezuelan blogger-analyst Daniel Tello points to weekday orders of around 30,000 units with a weekend drop-off of 15,000 units.

Add Tello’s prediction to the 120,000 outlined by AAPL, and Apple may well have shifted more than 600,000 iPads before the device’s formal launch.

Around the Web