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Comment by soupboy | Hacker News Reader

It was estimated that they will sell 11.9 million iPads and they sold 11.8 million. So wouldn't say they missed by much. Also, the new iPad began selling on March 16th and the quarter ended March 31st. So the real effect of the new iPad should come this quarter.

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Where are you getting the 11.9M estimate? 13M seems to be the general consensus.

Source:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-on...

Also, won't the new iPad sales be the highest during the launch week and then settle down?

Apple sold as many as they could make. Whatever it is, (low) demand for the new iPad is not the reason why Apple didn't meet expectations.

Also: follow the links to the source. The Atlantic article misquoted its source. That source claims that the consensus is 12 million.

Sales dry up before a new launch and after it they are constrained by supply. Also the iPad 3 was on sale at March 16th only in America. In Europe (Japan?) it was March 23.

I agree with the points you are making, but the iPad did in fact launch in ten countries on March 16th, including many important European countries (like Germany) and Japan.

Erm, you are right!

The story which The Atlantic quotes from in support of their 13 million consensus estimate actually says:

"The most pessimistic analysts are calling for sales of just 9 million; the most optimistic see sales of over 15 million. Consensus is for about 12 million, which would be a year-over-year increase of 155%."

Couldn't find a description on how consensus was derived (is it an arithmetic mean?). Depending on how much of an outlier the 15 million estimate was, 11.8 million actual sales might actually be above the median estimate.

update: found the source http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/19/how-many-ipads-did-ap...

Looks like Apple was well below the median, though PED says the 6 most accurate analysts he has been tracking had a consensus estimate of 10.95 million iPads.

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