Worldwide iPod Storage Total
posted at 5:55 pm
on May. 3, 2005
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I was reading this Computerworld article about a dentist who uses an iPod to back up his patient data, and starting thinking…
Everywhere I walked in New York, I saw white earbuds in people’s ears. Subway crime in New York would be down slightly this year, except for the rise in theft of iPods, which pushes the stats up 10%.
Apple shipped 5,310,000 million iPods in the first quarter of 2005, up 558% from last year. Yes, that’s right, more than 500% higher than last year.
Around Christmas, they sold 4.5 million iPod music players, up 525% from last year’s holiday season.
That compares to 5.7 million iPods in total up to 4th quarter of 2004.
So in total, there’s now 15 million iPods sold.
I have a first generation iPod. It holds 5 gigs of data, and I still use it regularly. I had to replace the battery last year, but it still trucks along. It’s safe to assume that most of the iPods sold are still in use.
So, I’ve put together a quick estimate, and I figure there’s about 229 petabytes—229,000,000 gigabytes—of storage space floating around on iPods. That’s pretty amazing.
But what’s most amazing, is that there were 300 million Sony Walkmans sold during the 80s-90s. Even ignoring the increase in storage size that will happen in the next 10 years, if iPods catch on like Walkmans, we’re talking 4.44 exabytes—4,438,000,000 GB—of data storage on iPods.
As my math teacher used to say, “This begins to get interesting, no?”
Here’s my (admittedly rough and estimated) chart:
| ipods sold | ||||
| 5,310,000 | ipods sold | Jan-05 | ||
| 4,500,000 | ipods sold | Oct-04 | ||
| 5,700,000 | ipods sold | Pre Oct 2004 | ||
| 15,510,000 | Total ipods sold | |||
| storage space | number sold | Total storage | ||
| 0.512 | ipod shuffle | 1,500,000 | 768,000 | GB |
| 1 | ipod shuffle | 1,500,000 | 1,500,000 | GB |
| 4 | ipod mini | 1,000,000 | 4,000,000 | GB |
| 6 | ipod mini | 300,000 | 1,800,000 | GB |
| 5 | ipod gen1 | 400,000 | 2,000,000 | GB |
| 10 | ipod | 3,000,000 | 30,000,000 | GB |
| 15 | ipod | 2,000,000 | 30,000,000 | GB |
| 20 | ipod | 4,000,000 | 80,000,000 | GB |
| 40 | ipod | 710,000 | 28,400,000 | GB |
| 30 | ipod photo | 500,000 | 15,000,000 | GB |
| 60 | ipod photo | 600,000 | 36,000,000 | GB |
| total ipods | 15,510,000 | 229,468,000 | ||
| 300,000,000 | 4,438,452,611 | |||
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