Looks like Seattle wasn’t the only place where people showed up in droves for Apple’s iPad 2. The new version of the Apple device appears to have completely sold out across the country, according to analyst surveys summed up in this Fortune report.
One of the analysts, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, estimates that Apple sold 400,000 to 500,000 iPad 2s during that initial launch period, compared with 300,000 original iPads sold in roughly the same time last year.
Other analysts are even more bullish. “We would not be surprised to see Apple sell closer to 1 million iPad 2s in the opening weekend,” says Wedbush Securities analyst Scott Sutherland, as quoted this morning by Reuters.
Munster’s survey found that about 70 percent of iPad 2 buyers were new to the iPad, not having owned one of the original devices. That’s more newbies than I would have guessed based on our conversations with people in line at the University Village Apple Store on Friday afternoon. Quite a few of the people we talked with — including the first guy in line — were original iPad owners looking to upgrade.
