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.
Marco Arment, developer of popular read-it-later app (and service) Instapaper, threw together the handy bar graph above to display just how desperate a battle it’s become for iPad challengers. Check out the Blackberry Playbook — it’s struggling against sales of the Philips CD-i, a game system I’d never even heard of (and I worked at a software/video game store in high school).
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.
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