Report: Apple iPod nano sales fall short? Black outsells white by large margin? [Updated]

21 years ago

“First week sales of Apple’s new shockingly thin iPod nano have fallen short of expectations, with most Apple retail stores having sold only one-fourth of their initial inventory of the players, AppleInsider has learned. A couple of Apple retail stores in California, which last week received over 1400 iPod nanos, said they sold only a couple of hundred units by Saturday. This despite favorable reviews from both analysts and the media,” AppleInsider reports.

Black iPod nano units “‘are outselling the white ones by a great deal,’ Shaw Wu, an analyst for American Technology Research, wrote in a research note released to clients on Tuesday. ‘5 to 1 and in some cases as high as 8 to 1.’ Coincidentally, these sales ratios completely contrast Apple’s initial production ratios of the nano, which reports suggest were 1 black nano for every 5 to 8 white nanos,” AppleInsider reports.

Full article here.

“Mr. Wu wrote, cautioning ‘iPod nano has only started shipping since Sept. 7, and thus it may be difficult to draw a trend with only six days of data,'” The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal reports.

Full article here.

[UPDATED 12:56pm ET: Added quote from Wu via Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.]

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As Apple Store affiliates, MacDailyNews and iPodDailyNews, without revealing actual figures, can report that the iPod nano is, by far, the most successful product we’ve ever featured on our websites in terms of units sold based on five days of sales (9/8-9/12). Perhaps people were/are unsure of retail availability and are buying online during the first week? To us, reports based on less than a week of data seem a bit premature and specious to determine the extent of iPod nano’s success. Everything we see from iPod nano at this extremely early date screams “grand slam” to us.

We have no way of telling whether black or white iPod nano units are selling better via our websites, but anecdotal information we’ve heard from other sources, suggests that black is easily the most popular iPod nano color.