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iPod touch made up 37.7 percent of all iOS devices sold so far

On September 1st, Apple announced that 120 million iOS devices were sold to date.

We know that there were 59.6 million iPhones sold through June (from SEC filings)

We also know that 3.2 million iPads were sold.

If we assume about 8 million iPhones and 4 million iPads were sold during August and July, the total number of iPod touch sold is 45.2 million.

That is 37.7% of total units.

In April I wrote that 41% of all iOS units sold were iPod touch to date.

The expansion of iPhone distribution plus the addition of iPad as reduced the platform footprint for the iPod, but it’s still a sizable chunk. More than one in three iOS units in use are non-cellular devices. As the iPad rolls that number could move toward 50%.

Where are the iPod touch knockoffs?

The latest iOS numbers and the new iPod touch launch demonstrate what a huge hit the iPod touch has become. It’s safe to assume that about half of all iPods, or between 4 and 5 million units in the current quarter, are sold as touch versions.

The iPod touch has been around about as long as the iPhone. It was launched three months after the first iPhone 2G, almost exactly three years ago. While the iPad has been in the market less than six months, a large number of potential competitors have been launched running Android and there seems to be a real rush to market. Six months is about as quickly as any hardware product can be reasonably engineered.

So the question is why is the iPad being cloned while the iPod has remained in the market by itself?

The value of the iPod is arguably as high with a healthy margin and consistent pricing. The volumes are comparable with tens of millions already sold so there is no obvious economic disadvantage to the iPod vs. iPad. Indeed, the iPod touch is a large (1.6) multiplier to the whole iOS platform. The demographics are very sweet too with a clear upsell opportunity.

One explanation might be that the iPod is a music device and that market has been locked up with iTunes, putting up a huge barrier to entry. However during the music launch this month, there was almost no mention of the iPod touch as a music player while it was loudly touted as a game and app platform. Browsing and Facetime are also huge uses for the device.

So in the iPod touch we have a mini iPad–ironically, the dig at the iPad was that it was nothing more than a large iPod touch.

So if cloners are rushing to copy the iPad, why not its smaller incarnation?

LG says WP7 will outperform Android

LG has reportedly told Korean sources that “it expects WP7 to outperform the two rival smartphone operating systems” – one of these platforms is definitely Android (I’m not sure about the other platform LG is referring to; Symbian? iOS? BlackBerry?).

via LG to bank heavily on Windows Phone 7, says WP7 will outperform Android » Unwired View.

While Samsung believes WP7 is doomed, LG believes it will RULE!

This might go some way to explain why LG is in such dire straits when it comes to smartphone share.

Samsung plans for Android, Bada, Windows Phone and Symbian phones

“We are not seeing visible demand for Symbian,” she said.

via Samsung says to focus on Android, bada software | Reuters.

I was ready to dig into this, but the same person is quoted saying this of Microsoft’s new Windows Phone:

“There is still some professional, specialized demand there,”

Whaaa?

Windows Phone is anything but professional and specialized. It’s designed to orphan business users and is targeted to mainstream use.

Another example of head-scratching random marketing word generation.

Property rights for your living room

The new Apple TV has created a cottage industry of pundits debating the future ownership of your living room. This topic of to whom your living room belongs has been around since the 90’s when Microsoft sought to plant a flag on your TV set and claim it in the name of Gates with a cable box software platform. A few billion dollars later they came away with not a single deed, not even to your couch.

Talk of ownership flared up again in the last decade as various game consoles and boxes paraded in front of consumers. There were wars waged over DVD formats, encoding formats and DRM. Then came hulu and Apple TV and roku and who knows what else I missed.

It’s all bound to go badly. Here’s why this property will remain off limits:

  • The ownership is not for the space but for the time and attention of the audience. The time spent consuming televised content is what’s at stake.
  • That time is increasingly being fragmented. It was first broken into tiny pieces by cable channels that divided audiences into niches.
  • Erosion of cohesive audiences continued with DVD rentals and Netflix. Home theaters ate into both broadcast and outside-the-home entertainment
  • Attention was attacked with PVRs like Tivo.
  • Demographics were exploded with game consoles with age groups separating into different modes of consumption.
  • Migration of other portable devices like laptops, smartphones and iPads into the couch room are now further degrading the value of the “living room” as a significant target for advertisers.
  • Internationally there never was a unified living room. Consumption patterns and even broadcast business models vary widely.

Ultimately there’s really nothing in “the living room” worth fighting for. The disruptive play here is the crumbling of monolithic audiences that used to define “prime time”. It’s not a new box to take over from another box.

The technologies that are coming to invade the living room have already broken it into parcels that lack cohesion.

Just like the division of land among numerous generations of heirs creates land only useful for residential development, it’s time to abandon dreams of owning the farm. That farm has long ago stopped being fertile.

Nokia says: "My activations are bigger than your activations"

While Jobs and Schmidt were having a contest over their mobile platform activation numbers…

Pshaw to all that, says Symbian. The company points out that according to Canalys’ research, there’s 300,000 Symbian devices activated on a daily basis, which equals 109.5 million phones activated annually.

via Sad Nokia Wants You To Know It’s Activating 300,000 Smartphones Daily.

I long for the good old days when we used to just measure units sold per quarter.

The race to a billion users

I took the venerable Consumer Platform Adoption Ramps chart and added Android and the latest data on iTunes, iPod and iOS.

To make it more readable (but conceptually more complicated) I put the data on a log chart.

Discussion

The time span covered is nine and a half years. The top of the graph marks the one billion threshold. Reaching one billion in less than 10 years is an interesting challenge for any platform and, at first glance, it seems that both iOS and Android have a shot at it. This does not seem likely for any of the other platforms.

The challenge is that as penetration grows, it’s natural for the slope for the lines to become shallower. Some platforms are simply not able to address one billion users:

  • i-Mode, AOL and other technologies with localized value networks are clearly limited to populations in their home countries.
  • iTunes is limited by the use of a PC, which has a small footprint in under-developed countries (dependency by iOS on iTunes should throw up a red flag here).
  • The iPod was embraced and extended by more ubiquitous mobile phones.

In contrast, mobile phones in general and smartphone platforms in particular have potential to reach a billion users (per platform.)

To wit, note that iOS and Android have similar curves to date and are both likely to overtake iPod and any other contender.

So for the obligatory theological question: Will Android follow the curve of iOS or will it diverge and continue on a steeper trajectory? Does it matter?

Discuss…

September Music Event: Just the numbers

  • 300 Apple Stores
  • 10 countries with Apple Stores
  • >1 million store visitors some days
  • 80k 1:1 sessions/week
  • 120 million iOS devices sold to date
  • 230k new iOS activations per day
  • 6.5 Billion apps downloaded
  • 200 apps downloaded every second
  • 250k apps available on App Store
  • 25k iPad apps available on App Store
  • 275 million iPods sold
  • #1 portable game player: iPod touch
  • 50%+ of portable game device share US and world-wide
  • 1.5 billion game and entertainment titles downloaded to iPod touch
  • 11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
  • 450 million TV episodes downloaded from iTunes
  • 100 million movies downloaded from iTunes
  • 35 million books downloaded from iTunes
  • 160 million iTunes accounts
  • 23 countries for iTunes music downloads
  • 12 million song library

Quarterly Earnings Multiples: The new normal?

Based on the new iOS units numbers released I revised at the numbers for next quarter and it’s very probable that EPS will be over $5.25.

As recently as 2007 Apple was priced 50x one year’s earnings.

Now it’s priced 47x one quarter’s earnings.

Should we consider applying old yearly earnings multiples to quarterly earnings as the new valuation normal?

20 Million iOS devices sold in about 2.5 months

On June 7th, 2010, at WWDC, Apple announced that they will have sold 100 million iOS devices some time during June 2010. Today, September 1st, Apple announced that 120 million iOS devices have been sold.

Assuming that 100 million was crossed half-way through June, then the additional 20 million units must have been sold during half of June, and all of July and August. That’s approximately 20 million over 75 days or 267k units per day.

Apple also announced that there are 230k new iOS activations per day which seems consistent given that they classify these as “new” activations.

There is one huge implication of this figure:  Forecasts for iPhone, iPad and iPods may be too low. I had forecast 20 million units for the entire quarter (12.1 million iPhones, 4 million iPads and about 4 million iPod touch). The iPhone figure assumed 65% y/y growth at that looks way too low. There is still another month in the quarter meaning that the total could be 30% too low.

I will be updating the forecast accordingly.

Asymco

Asymmetric Competition

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