Apple's new iPod Touch appears to have been a huge hit this holiday season with evidence that the high end iPod has seen massive gains in marketshare.
The first impact was seen in early sales numbers for App Store applications on Christmas day. The #1 ranked App Store application (iFart Mobile) saw a tripling of sales from 13,000 units a day to almost 39,000 units on Christmas day. This growth in sales, however, was not just isolated to the #1 spot and was seen across the entire App Store. Several game developers on TouchArcade.com reported sales boosts of 3x-4x across all titles, even for titles not in the top 100 listings.
Sales for Hit Tennis
Hit Tennis [App Store] developer Mark Johnson reported a 4x sales increase on Christmas for his tennis game and provides this striking graph (above).
The massive boost in App Store sales appears to be from a large influx of iPod Touch users. Amazon lists the 8GB and 16GB iPod Touch as the best selling MP3 players despite their relatively higher cost. Meanwhile a little creative exploring of Net Application's Hitslink website reveals the following web marketshare graph for the iPod Touch:
iPod Touch browser marketshare
The graph shows real time browser marketshare data for the iPod Touch which showed a massive spike on Christmas day. While there is a slight increase in the iPhone graph as well, the majority of the Christmas growth appears to be with the iPod Touch. This trend, of course, reflects the difficulties in gifting an iPhone vs an iPod touch. Net Application generates browser marketshare data based on 160 million visitors from their data pool.
Apple has been marketing the iPod Touch as more than just an MP3 player with a specific focus on gaming. If these trends are true, then some of the boost in App Store downloads should be sustained as it reflects actual marketshare growth rather than just increased spending surrounding the holidays.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...