The iPad is taking off faster than anything Apple has shipped before, including the iPod and iPhone, both a pair of monster hits.
Look at this amazing chart from Mary Meeker, a former Wall St. analyst who is now with the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It shows the initial shipments of the iPad compared to the iPhone and iPod.
When the iPod was introduced in 2001, Apple shipped 236,000 units in the first three quarters. In 2007, the iPhone shipped 3.7 million units in its first three quarters. But the iPad blows both away: 14.8 million units shipped.
Steve Jobs has said the iPad was like “catching a tiger by the tail.” No kidding.
And here’s how the iTunes App Store is selling vastly more apps than it sold music or movies:
The slides are from a presentation by Meeker and her Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy at Google’s thinkmobile conference. The complete slideshow is embedded below.
Google’s not doing so bad either. Here’s Android’s growth.
This is what Meeker and Murphy predict for 2001 and beyond. Notice how the trends play to the rumor’s of the iPhone 5 and iPad 2: NFC and enterprise adoption.
• HTML5 vs. downloadable apps
• NFC (Near Field Communication) for payment / offers / loyalty
• Consumer led mobile health for monitoring / diagnosis / wellness
• Rapid enterprise adoption of tablets for productivity
• Tipping Point – > 50% population in developed markets will have Smartphone
• “SoLoMo” – Social / local / mobile converging • “Gamification” – Ultimate way to engage a new generation of
audiences
• Empowerment – impact of empowering billions of people around the world with real-time connected devices has just begun…
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
