Steve Jobs Presentation Skills Lead To Strong Presales for iPad

iPad Presales Strong

Now that the dust has settled on the beginning of the iPad presales period, some interesting facts have started to come out about the initial draw of the device. Regardless of your opinion of the iPad and its future success as a consumer device, you have to admit that the numbers that have come to light are very telling.

Before we talk about some raw statistics, it is interesting to note this one thing: any sales Apple does between now and general availability of the device are completely site unseen. All of these sales are based on the presentation skills of Steve Jobs, a commercial that started airing at the Oscars, and the wall to wall media coverage that started in January. No review units in the media, no press junkets to play with the device. It is a marketing tactic completely unprecedented in the world of modern computing. Would you buy a new car without driving it? Would you buy a house without seeing it? Of course not. What this does speak to however is the trust the computing public who are already predisposed to buying an Apple device have in the quality of Apple products. We may not have seen an iPad for ourselves but we have seen MacBooks, iMacs, iPods, and iPhones and they are good. What do we have to lead us to believe the iPad would be otherwise? Nothing.

The real story is the numbers though. Stan Shroeder, in an article on Mashable, reports that some estimates are saying Apple sold 150,000 iPad’s in the first 60 hours of presale availability. A 100,000 of those were sold in the first 10 hours. Even if everyone only bought the $499 base WiFi version, simple math tells you that’s $74,850,000 USD in Apple’s pocket after 60 hours. And surely not everyone bought the base version. Although I can’t speak to verifiable facts, I would dare say that is probably one of the highest initial presales in history.

But you may be unimpressed with that number so let me use another number to put that into perspective for you.

Google’s much vaunted “super phone”, the Nexus One, had only sold 135,000 units after the first 74 days of availability. Yes, you read that right. Not the first 74 hours of availability.

A wise man once told me people generally vote with their wallets. In the case of the iPad, I think the buzz and demand around the presales period speaks for itself. It will be interesting to see how many have been sold before the first one sees the light of day on April 3rd. If the initial orders are any indication, Apple has another winner on their hands.

What do you think? Will all the people who preordered be crushed with disappointment on April 3rd? Will the iPad be an oversold flop or the most successful personal computing device of all time. Leave us a comment and let us know.

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