Amazon Sold More Than 4M Kindle Devices in December — Less Than One Day for Apple
Just how popular were Kindles as Christmas gifts? Amazon said today it sold at least 4 million of the devices in December, or 1 million each week. Sounds great until we check Apple numbers and find the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant demolished the Internet retailer’s sales hype in about one day.
In an announcement devoid of many specifics, the Seattle-based company said it had sold “well over 1 million Kindle devices per week.” The Kindle family of devices range all the way from the $79 Kindle e-reader to the $199 Kindle Fire tablet, which could be the iPad’s most worrisome rival to date. Amazon added that Kindle books as gifts rose 175 percent over last year. The fact that they provided no real numbers for comparison would warm the hearts of even Apple’s PR department.
How did Apple’s iOS family compare? Fortune did some figuring and estimated at least 4.2 million iOS devices — iPhones, iPads and iPod touches — were activated on Christmas Day alone.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
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