naznatips said:
famousringo said:
He's talking about current sales rates, not total lifetime sales.
Weekly DS and PSP sales are running around 350k per week these days.
Sales of iOS devices are running around 230k per day, or 1.6 million per week.
If iPod Touch = 22% or more of iOS sales, then statement = true.
It's really not as outlandish a statement as it sounds. DS and PSP are well past their peak, and the iPod Touch is still gaining steam as the hardware and software environment get stronger every year. One of the nice things about iterating your product every year is that saturation becomes a much smaller problem.
Edit: Sigh, fixed my use of the unsupported plus sign. No wonder these forums can be so negative. 
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Your statement is extremely skeweed by the iPhone 4 launch, and current iOS device weekly sales are half that. Those sales also include the iPad and more importantly the iPhone, and last numbers given show the iPhone is alone more than 70% of iOS sales, making it extremely unlikely that the iPod Touch makes it up to even 20% of the total iOS sales.
To compound this, there were only 32 million iPod Touches sold by the end of 2009, which was 2.25 years of sales. We can safely assume the device is nearing or has passed 40 million by now, but that does make it a fraction of total DS sales and nowhere near as fast-selling a device.
But wait, there's more! iOS software just passed the PSP in gaming revenue this year. source. Again, this is across all iOS devices, of which the iPod is less than 30%. Oh but it gets better, that's pure revenue, not actual profit, and it's not even 1/6 of the revnue of DS software. In addition, matching PSP software revnue is a joke, as PSP software revenue is already a joke itself. The PSP is a software profits disaster. It's like being slightly less radioactive than Chernobyl. I'm not even done yet! Almost 50% of the revenue on the iOS store comes from the top 5 selling games! Leaving almost no sales for lower-end apps and developers.
In conclusion, not only is the iPod Touch not competitive in weekly or lifetime hardware sales, but the iOS as a whole is not a competitive gaming platform in software sales. This is a joke of PR, and absolutely silly statement that is both untrue and misleading as to the platform's validity as a gaming device. You should not be focusing on iOS games unless you plan to make Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, or Fruit Ninja. /thread
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There's nothing that compels me to respond quite so much as the arrogant inclusion of "/thread" at the end of a post.
First off, I'm going to ignore your tirade about the software market. Neither myself nor Steve Jobs has made claims about the relative size of PSP, DS, and App Store software revenues, and there's a serious shortage of reliable information on the App Store. I even have reservations about that linked Flurry report. It's limited to US only, and while Flurry is in a position to know a thing or two about App Store sales, they don't have a history of estimating software sales. They could be high, could be low, could be way off base.
So lets focus on hardware, since the information is more reliable and because it's actually the subject in dispute here. I'd really like to see a source for your assertion that the iPhone represents 70% of current sales. The latest numbers in Apple's Q3 financials list 8.4 million iPhones and 3.27 million iPads. Okay, so the iPhone made up 70% of iOS devices that aren't iPod Touches. I think we might have found where you got your number from. The iPhone 4 doesn't skew this quarter very much, actually, since it's severely supply-constrained, was only on sale for three weeks of the quarter, and is preceded by slow iPhone sales in anticipation of the new release. Alas, in this report Apple lists 9.41 million iPods, but doesn't break down how many of those are iPod Touches.
We don't know how many iPod Touches actually sold this last quarter, so the best we can do is estimate based on historical data. Historically, the iPod Touch sells between 60% and 75% as many units as the iPhone. You can see examples of this trend here and here (that last guy draws an erroneous conclusion, but he does a decent job of teasing out iPod Touch sales numbers from Apple statements). So if this trend holds for Apple's latest quarter, the iPod Touch will have sold between 5 - 6.3 million units, or 30-35% of all iOS devices.
Okay, so how does my (admittedly very rough) estimate of the last quarter of iPod Touch unit sales compare with VGC's estimates of worldwide PSP and DS hardware sales for the same period?:
VGChartz Hardware data for the period 28th Mar 2010 to 26th Jun 2010:
| Console |
PSP |
DS |
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Total
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1,273,626
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3,634,077
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Just a hair under 5 million units. I re-iterate my position that Steve Jobs' claim is not as outlandish as it sounds.
