Apple beats estimates with surprising strong sales from iPad

After the stock market closed today, Apple announced their earnings - net income rose to $3.25 billion during the quarter ending June 30 (which is a 78% increase from a year ago).  Strong sales came from Mac computers, iPhone and, of course, the iPad.

What is surprising is that Apple sold almost 3.3 million iPads during the quarter almost matching the number of Mac computers sold - 3.47 million.  To put things into perspective, it took Apple 20 months to sell 1 million iPods.

Image via CrunchBase

iPad sales produced $2.1 billion in new sales.  Doing the math, one can see the average selling price around $636, higher than the least expensive model which costs $499.  This shows that Apple is successfully selling the higher price model.  These figures exceed Tablet Connect's expectations.  Mind you that these strong sales figures were produced in a tough economy with high unemployment.  One can only imagine what the figures would be if the economy was strong and unemployment low. 

What some analysts were concern with was whether the iPad was going to cannablize the sales of Apple's own Mac computers.  Mac sales result this quarter was the best yet.  “Apple was scared that the iPad would cannibalize sales of Macintosh computers,” said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray. “That’s not happening.”  This supports our belief that tablet PCs are a compliment rather than a substitute for the desktop or laptop PCs.

Other vendors are probably salivating at these results.  The question is can they deliver a product that would produce those results.