Apple Sells Over 300,000 iPads First Day
Apple® today announced that it sold over 300,000 iPads in the US as of midnight Saturday, April 3. These sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores.
Context & Ripple Effects
The day-one figure caps a three-week demand arc that was anything but linear: estimates put 50,000 iPad orders in the first two hours after the March 12 preorder opening, then trackers flagged sharply falling daily order rates by mid-March. The 300,000-plus count — spanning pre-order deliveries, channel partners, and Apple Retail Stores — settles whether that dip was fading interest or just backlog timing, and it lands on the strong side.
Who bought matters as much as how many: Piper Jaffray's survey syndicated alongside the announcement found 74% of buyers owned Macs and 66% owned iPhones, meaning the launch drew overwhelmingly from inside Apple's installed base rather than converting Windows or Android users.
First-order effects
- Apple's channel partners and retail stores absorb immediate inventory pressure on a product that only reached shelves April 3, while the company's own count bundles all three channels into one headline number that sets the market's bar for tablet demand.
- Walt Mossberg's enthusiastic review, already fueling press speculation about laptop obsolescence, gets a sales datapoint to lean on — sharpening the laptop-versus-tablet narrative competitors must now answer publicly.
Second-order effects
- The buyer profile (74% Mac owners, 66% iPhone owners) signals the iPad launched as an ecosystem add-on, which pressures rival tablet efforts to match not just hardware but an installed base of synced devices and App Store content.
- App Store dynamics follow the hardware overnight: Apple pulled 'Facebook Ultimate', an impostor iPad app, within days of launch, evidence that developers are rushing unvetted tablet software into a store whose review process now gates a brand-new screen size.
Third-order effects
- If first-day demand holds, the iPad establishes a third computing category between smartphone and laptop — the exact position Steve Jobs staked out at the January unveiling — forcing every PC maker to decide whether to cede the slot or field a competing slate.
- The teardown work on the A4 processor points to the deeper structural bet: Apple now designs its own silicon, runs its own stores, and controls its own retail, so each successful category launch compounds a vertically integrated moat rivals must replicate at the chip level, not just the device level.
The trend: Consumer computing is splitting into a multi-device ecosystem anchored by one vendor's silicon, software store, and retail footprint — and the iPad's debut is the first large-scale test of whether that integration can create a product category outright.