Orders for the Apple iPad fell sharply over the weekend, indicating that most of the real obsessives bought one on Friday.
Venezuelan analyst Daniel Tello reckons the company had a whopping 50,000 pre-orders in the first two hours on Friday, rising to 120,000 for the first full day.
But over the weekend that slipped to a comparative trickle, of around 1,000 per hour. Over the next couple of weeks, says Tello, there’s likely to be around 30,000 preorders on weekdays and half that on weekends.
Tello – aka Deagol – tracks order numbers supplied by volunteers on the AAPL Sanity Board at Investor Village. But his calculations are therefore produced by multiplying up from a comparatively small sample.
If the pattern continues as Tello expects, though, orders should hit half a million by the time of the official launch on April 3, and a million by about two weeks later.
Two-thirds of pre-orders were for the Wifi-only model.
Tello concedes he could do with more volunteers to give some of their order details. He wants order numbers – with the last three digits XXX’d out – number of iPads ordered, time, time zone, memory capacity and whether the order was for a 3G or Wifi model.
Email him at ipadsales10@gmail.com.