Remember Panasonic’s 3DO game system back in the mid ’90s? Not surprised if you don’t; it failed miserably and was discontinued after three years, despite being packed with promise and cutting-edge technology. But the three-year sales record of this flop have thus far still managed to handily beat that of Android tablets — all of them. Combined.
Says Amrent on his original post: “I didn’t include the iPad’s approximately 30 million units on here because it distorted the graph’s scale too much.” Funny.
When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of Wired.com and BIKE Magazine, among others. Hang with him on Twitter.
30 responses to “Android Tablets Not Even Selling as Well as These Forgotten Game Systems?”
This graph makes no sense. It means nothing. It should compare units sold for a given amount of time in the market.
………..Where were these stats taken from exactly?
Because I know Asus transformer sold over 2 million units on its own and that’s a small name tablet no1 has ever heard of before.
And its well known that the original galaxy tab7 sold 1-2 million units.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. These figures are wrong not even considering the mainstream ipad competitors…..
Another factually void article curtsy of cultofiDiots.com
You beat me to it Eduardo. Those systems sold for a longer amount of time, Android tablets have been selling for barely a year.
http://bit.ly/dI3hcF
I paiid $21.87 for an iPad 2 32-GB and my girlfriend loves her Pansonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $ 38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $ 657 which only cost me $ 62.81 . Here is the site we use to get it al from, http://to.ly/aWnA
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
While I agree with you that this article is devoid of both meaning and context, you are mistaken in your belief that the original Galaxy Tab 7 sold 2 million units. The 2 million units you are referring to was the number shipped to dealers, not the number sold from dealers to consumers.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/20…
Thanks for your comment. In reply:
1. The Asus Transformer is hardly a “small-name tablet no one has ever heard of before’; by many accounts, it’s one of the top-selling Android tablets, right up there with the Galaxy Tab.
2. The graph and conclusions were first published by Marco Arment. Here are the sources he cites:
For the list of poorest selling game consoles:
http://www.gamepro.com/article…
For the argument of shipped vs. sold tablets:
http://daringfireball.net/2011…
He also refers to a WSJ article; but since I’m not a WSJ subscriber, I can’t get beyond the first couple of paragraphs. Here’s the link, in case you are (though I doubt it):
http://online.wsj.com/article/…
Oh, so we are totally ignoring the last 2-3 years of android tablets not running honeycomb…..
That’s fair :-S
So this article should really be titled “last 2 years of ipad sales higher than last 5 months of SELECT android tablets”
Because the same article you just linked said there were over 2.4 million Nooks sold which is an android based tablet…
see comment above.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
CD-i was sold in Holland. It stands for CD interactive. It wasn’t a big success, to put it mildly.
It failed like all other Philips computer efforts. The biggest failure I know of was MSX, this was also intended as a game computer.
J.
All the posts here that shamelessly tear apart Mr. Milchman for this article are, in a word, “idiotic.” Why? Because only a bird with his head in the sand would be blind to all the media hype that continually proclaims how much better Android sales are fairing and how they will fair even better than Apple “in the future.” The “Apple will be doomed in the end” authors are still alive and well, unfortunately not having all died out at the end of the 1990’s when they proclaimed death for Apple was then near to the door.
Putting it more simply for those of you who “still don’t get it,” this article aims at showing that all the media hoopla surrounding Android is ridiculously blown out of proportion. Android is not the Techno Second Coming, despite what the anti-Apple crowd hopes for. Even so, the only way to satisfy these Apple pessimists is to wait a few years for long term Android tablet sales numbers to be forever placed in the historical record. I look forward to seeing those figures, which I personally have no doubt will still show Apple in the lead. But if we recall how the 1990’s “Apple will die!” writers are still alive and well, we can be certain the anti-Apple media distortion field will still be stronger than every a decade hence — perpetually claiming that “Apple is now out of ideas.”
All one can do now is just buy more AAPL stock, sit back and laugh.
The CD-i was also sold over here in the UK. My family had one and we loved it!
It wasn’t strictly a games console, but more of an educational tool. I had an encyclopaedia on CD and an interactive 3-D globe also. A sort of precursor to Wikipedia and Google Earth.
You could also get a video card add-on which slotted into the back, and allowed you to play movies on CD which were specially sold in CD-i format. This is before DVDs/laserdisc when everyone else was still buying VHS cassettes and rewinding and fast-forwarding to get to the part they wanted!
Personally I loved it, but it was very expensive so not many were sold. And now the Internet has made any such product irrelevant.
Basically it was waaaay before its time, and it will never make a return.
I agree – here in Thailand tablets are all the rage. Android tablets are being sold everywhere. Yet I only occasionally see one in day to day life, it’s always a bit of an exotic thing. Next to that, there’s a sea of iPads – iPads everywhere you look. Last time in the coffee shop, I counted 6 iPads, 2 PC laptops, and 2 Mac laptops. And that for a device that only started selling here less than a year ago, it’s pretty incredible.
Blockbuster success would be understating it. It’s more like a revolution. I am not saying it will last, or sales will continue to explode like this – who knows. All I know is that I hardly ever see an Android tablet. If I see one it’s usually a cheap 7″. Never seen a Galaxy Tab 10.1 out in the wild.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
And look at all the fanboys saying the chart must be wrong, the data is corrupted & blah blah. FYI charts mean nothing (& yes that includes your charts where iOS is beating Android one week & the next week it’s not). It’s just bogus non sense that companies put out to please the fanboys on both sides. Relax.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
I found a lot of info about android tabs here http://techworld-today.com/201…