These sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores.
via apple.com
When did Apple start including deliveries to the channel in their sales figures? Are these really “sales”?
Contents copyright © 2007-2012 Tom Reestman under this Creative Commons 3.0 License.
I believe that Apple has always included product delivered to resellers in their sales figures. Really no other way to do it, is there? Once delivered, the reseller owns the product = Apple has sold the product. Apple has talked about weeks of inventory on key products in every earnings call.If Apple had a history of stuffing the channel, then this would be a problem. Apple ‘only’ sent 30 units to each best buy (675 launch locations) = 20,500 iPads. I have no idea how many other channel partners got iPads at launch, but I think it is safe to say that the total number of iPads going to these locations wasn’t enough to skew the sales results.