“Amazon on Monday claimed that its Kindle sales on Black Friday were much higher than last year,” Electronista reports. “The combination of the $79 Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire moved four times as many units as the same day last year. The Fire was the top seller, having kept the lead on Amazon’s charts for the past eight weeks.”
“Target claimed that the Kindle Fire was the bestselling tablet in its stores that day, even outselling the iPad 2,” Electronista reports. “As with previous claims, Amazon declined to provide real numbers and said only that the total line had sold ‘millions’ before the Black Friday spike. Unofficial estimates have Amazon shipping as many as five million Kindle Fire tablets in 2011.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As expected. Now, how many buyers will have the same reaction as the honest reviewers (see below) and return the disappointing Kindle Fire when they realize that it’s not the $199 tiny-screen iPad they so hoped it would be? The number of Kindle Fire returns will be kept even more secret by Amazon than Kindle’s never-revealed sales figures.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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Congratulations to Amazon for losing $50 on every Kindle Fire! Good luck making that up from media sales to cheap asses only willing to pay $199 for a piece of crap tablet.
… asked for an iPad and was given a Kindle. (by my ex-wife … HAH!) To my surprise, he decided it is suitable to his needs! He reads, a shrinking market for decades now. None of these Kindles would satisfy my needs, or those of my current wife, but if it makes him happy? Good for him.
By the way, I tried Amazon Prime free and it wasn’t even worth my time. Sorry, Frank Stallone movies and documentaries on the Vermont maple syrup wars just didn’t float my boat.
They have XXX movies of Minka Kelly rolling around naked in bed but you have to ask the clerk to bring you round the back of the store.
In Homer Simpson voice: Mmmm….Minka Kelly.
Amazon Prime is one of the best deals out there if you buy things online. Amazon rocks with pricing and shipping.
1
The customer wins, but the business will not. There is no way Amazon is making money off this stuff.
Many Kindle Fire buyers never actually tried to use iPad, so they can not compare and can guess that this is how tablet actually works, including iPad.
Only after a time some of them might discover how much better iPad practically comparing to glitchy and slow Fire.
The story is similar to how many Windows users though since their OS has windows, too, that there is already no difference comparing to Mac experience.
So poorer quality of Apple’s competition does not really hurt them — in the long run.
So Apple has to fight hard for all markets it wants.
That’s the beauty of launching a new product into the holiday shopping season at a $200 price point. People will buy it, without knowing whether it’s a good value or not, and it’ll eventually sit in a drawer like the Wii in the corner, but at $200 it won’t be a tragedy.
The only losers will be the kids who open these turds on Christmas morning expecting an iPad.
According to secret never,before released data from Amazon servers, Amazon shipped 1;000,000 Kindle Fires to customers of which 999,999 ended up in Jeff Bezos’ house. No one is going to buy that sh*t when the Nook Tablet is only $50 more.
there is a good reason Amazon never gives numbers of actual sales…remember when Lord Steve-O would start each keynote with how well the sales figures were?
In the San Jose Mercury today Larry Magid writes that “Kindle Fire holds its own vs. iPad”. These kind of articles will have a lot of influence for the general puplic, i fear. He writes that he also has an iPad and for him the kindle does everything he needs and is more portable. Of course even though Apple is only a few miles from San Jose the Mercury has a bunch of Apple haters writing on tech stuff. They review every new product and in one day pronounce them as iDevice killers or at least challengers. About once a week I think about cancelling my subscription. But many parents will see they can save big bucks and get poor little Johnny a tablet for Xmas. Just sad.
I don’t understand the Amazon bashing. Competition is a good thing. Kindle in any form is not a threat to the iPad. Amazon’s delivery model works really well, and I have always found their customer service to be responsive and customer oriented.
That’s just it – the Kindle in any form isn’t a threat to the iPad, but a bunch of pundits, astroturfers, and Amazon itself are acting like it is.
Plus the Fire is crap(seriously, it doesn’t even reliably acknowledge touch input), which puts the cherry on top of the schadenfreude sundae.
Always remember and never forget, 4 times 2 is only 8.
Then there are the 4 returns to calculate.
“Math is hard!” Barbie.
well cheaper is better, don’t you all know that? The general public are geniuses.
Why always slam the Kindle Fire. People buy Kia’s and others buy Mercedes for a whole host of reasons. We cannot reasonably expect that apple will get 100% market share. It gets most of the high price point purchasers. Kindle attracts those with a tighter checkbook but would like some of the features of an iPad. Moreover the amazon kindle store is far better than iBooks by far IMHO.
Had a discussion with a couple this morning, they are apple users, both have iPhones
And an iPad2 that they love, they also have a kindle they use at the beach. They had planned on buying the fire, thinking it might be nice doing emails while on the beach, I explained it was not an Eink, would have the same glare as an iPad and they wouldn’t be able to access the web as they do not offer 3G.
They now plan on buying a regular kindle, and when I showed them AirPlay from their iPad to my ATV2, they are spending the differance on one of them!
What I am trying to say is, many people who want a kindle with new features, are not getting what they thought
@Castlebuono and Leftcoastman. You guys don’t get it. At some level, market share does matter, as long as programmers act like lemmings and refuse to write native programs for operating systems (like Linux) that are considered “marginal.” Why is it that certain things often don’t work as well as they should on the Mac, such as scanning, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and Flash, printer drivers, etc.? It’s because those functions rely on programming that is ported from some other operating system, making them slow and dysfunctional on OS X. Once a critical mass of code writers and businesses decide to deprecate an operating system, decline is inevitable. And because Apple doesn’t try to use hardware sales as a loss leader for advertising or bloatware or other profit centers, it suffers disproportionately when people decide that a low-cost alternative is “good enough.” For Apple, almost every competitor is out for blood.
I do get it. Why you think Apple is suffering from Amazon or anyone else’s business model is beyond my understanding. Apple is the tech industry leader. And in the tech industry you’re going to have the elite and not so elite. That’s just the way it is.
Apple was the tech industry leader in 1997, and it almost perished.
Doesn’t matter if it’s exactly as bad as the reviewers say, the $200 price point WILL get a lot of buyers who WILL assume they are having the whole tablet experience. As @derss said above, Apple will have to fight for the market.
Amazon has never released actual unit sales numbers of Kindle. So how can these analysts let Amazon get away with that?
“The combination of the $79 Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire moved four times as many units as the same day last year”
Yo, excuse me, the Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire are all separate products. You can’t just lump the unit sales of all three of them together as if they were a single product.
Well, not unless you’re deceitful and you’re trying to hide dissapointing unit sales of all three products by combining them in an attempt to create a false victory(like 4x as many units YOY) and pull the wool over the eyes of your investors.
“Amazon declined to provide real numbers”
What!? No way! I wonder why.
“and said only that the total line had sold ‘millions’”
But don’t ask them to prove it, because Amazon doesn’t do real numbers. To find out why, I asked Jeff Bezos. Jeff?
Jeff Bezos: Ah, well, you see… Amazon doesn’t provide real numbers because, umm… *mumblemumble*… Whoa! Look! Is that a squirrel over there!? *runs*
I read a lot of books on my iPad but I buy almost all of them on Amazon. The Apple bookstore is a disappointment; not many titles and expensive, often as much or more than the print editions. Amazon’s selection is much bigger and more reasonably priced. Buying is a breeze and customer service is great. I bought Prime and probably got $200 in free shipping this year. The free Prime movies do suck though.