Remember all the talk a few months ago whether the iPad would hurt sales of the iPod touch? That fear was overblown, according to one prominent analyst who Tuesday described the impact as ‘minimal.’
Additionally, despite early talk the iPad was selling better than Macs, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster expects the Cupertino, Calif. firm will sell more computers than Wall Street predicts. Indeed, Mac sales were up 37 percent for the first two months of Apple’s third-quarter, the period when iPads first went on sale.
Munster’s projections are the result of delving into retail sales figures released by the NPD group Tuesday. He expects Apple will announce 3.1 million to 3.2 million Macs sold during the third quarter, higher than the Wall Street consensus of 3.1 million.
Despite iPod sales being down 13 percent for the first two months of the year, the analyst doesn’t find it a cause for concern. The chief reason: the iPad carries a price tag four times that of the iPod. This is “a net positive for Apple’s business,” Munsters told investors Tuesday.
Ah, those crafty minds at Apple. While iPad fans reported the lack of a camera or keyboard, what some saw as a negative, the people at Cupertino viewed as preserving Mac sales. Munster believes the lack of such features allowed Apple to split its products into two distinct camps: content viewing and content creation. Although the iPad could be fitted with an external camera or keyboard, its central purpose was viewing e-books and playing games purchased at the App store. This left Mac sales still vital for heavy-duty hardcore content creation.
[via Fortune]
