While nothing has been officially released the estimates out on the street range from 400k – 600k sold in the first weekend. By contrast, and to compare, those numbers are higher than the original did in a week on Earth. Not too shabby. Also not surprising. This go around had it being sold everywhere and not just at the Apple Store. Essentially though, whatever stores had them, now don’t. Waiting lines now are huge.
As someone who was there for the first iPad on its first day, I was very surprised to see the massive lines at the store. I considered it a foregone conclusion long ago that cool gadgets and I would have a lifelong relationship so I fully expected to be in that line. The real good news here for Apple though is that a lot of folks buying it are doing so for the first time. One firm polled around 200 people in lines waiting to buy the iPad 2 and found out that most of the respondents were first-timers. For Apple to be able to convert newbies to the iOS platform is a huge move for securing future sales.
Financially this is clearly a huge win for Apple. They are slated to push 30 million of these suckers in 2011; nearly 6 million to be pushed by the end of March. That is quite a bit more than 2010. If we do a little math here, Apple reported a $26.7 billion take for 2010. 17% reportedly came from iPads. Nearly doubling those figures would be a massive maneuver.
