Apple's 1 Million iPads Sold Carry Additional Milestones

It's another success story for Apple, and the iPad is now well on its way to meeting even conservative sales estimates for its first several months, thanks to the just-released iPad 3G -- estimated to have moved 300,000 units of its own in opening weekend -- and Apple's plan to announce the launch of the iPad for international markets next week.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs' assessment of the iPad? "Magical."

"Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers," Jobs said in a statement released Monday.

Parsing Apple's officially released iPad sales numbers a bit further reveals some additional data points -- and perhaps, for Apple, a few more milestones to crow about.

The statistic most Apple observers have glommed on to so far is the fact that the iPad hit the one million sold mark in less than half the time -- 28 days compared with 74 days -- it took for Apple's original iPhone to reach that milestone.

As IDC's Al Hilwa pointed out to ChannelWeb Monday, it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison: the iPad, Hilwa explained, is a "derivative product," meaning that Apple users were already conditioned to expect certain things from iPad based on what they'd already experienced with iPhone.

But still, 1 million iPads sold in four weeks means Apple is moving some pretty substantial tablet weight on a daily basis. According to Apple, iPad saw more than 300,000 units sold in its first 24 hours, and in the four days following, about 150,000 were sold. Based on those figures, the remaining 23 days of the 28-day period give Apple a rate of just under 24,000 iPads sold per day since that time, or an average of just fewer than 1,000 per hour, which of course becomes many more per business hour.

Apple had a few more milestones tucked in its 1 millionth iPad sold press release Monday. According to the company, the App Store now contains more than 200,000 apps, meaning its grown by 15,000 from the 185,000-odd apps described in early April.

Apple also said that about 12 million apps and 1.5 million e-books have been downloaded, respectively, from the App Store and Apple's new iBookstore -- a figure that roughly indicates an average of between 13 and 14 items (apps or e-books) downloaded to each iPad sold since the April 3 launch.

Apple may run out of sales momentum as the initial hype around the iPad dies down in the coming months, but it's earliest numbers reveal a major success story for the tablet. Most interesting, perhaps, will be Apple's next reported quarterly earnings. Its most recent numbers amounted to a blowout Apple quarter on the back of iPhone and Mac sales -- i.e., before the iPad even went on sale.