And how is Google doing this Christmas?
Google Play Store has 5 devices in it now, with the new $199 Acer Chromebook arriving just yesterday.
Right now of the 5 items, two are still sold out through Christmas.
Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 are showing in stock now, which is an improvement. The Nexus 4 and the Samsung Chromebook are still sold out for the count, which is unchanged.
The original $499 Chromebook no longer shows in the listing (discontinued due to the high price, I suspect)
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What information is available on the Holiday Sales numbers so far?
Nexus 7 was selling at roughly a million a week and ASUS couldn't keep up with shipments -- total sales exceed 10 million in the first month of sales.
Nexus 4 is being built by LG and
it sold out totally in 4 minutes. Seriously, Walmart and Best Buy and all retailers logged more orders than they had stock allocated to them before the opening hour arrived. Nexus 4 will be WAY under water through New Years with all new shipments going to the major cell phone carriers to satisfy their B/Os first.
Nexus 10 is being built by Samsung and it is back in stock right now, but initial sales ripped through the world's supply in the first hour of the first day of sales with massive backorders which have just now begun to clear. Samsung builds their own chips, so they have a good supply for their own manufactured products.
$249 Samsung Chromebook. It is the ORIGINAL, very first ever ARM based Chromebook and it is sold out, period. The $199 Acer unit will take some pressure off of it, as the Acer is a better deal dollarwise, but if you wanted the original ARM Chromebook, nothing else will do. I think folks will buy it and then eventually forget about it under the wave of future better units next year, but that's my take, not theirs, right now.
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People are screaming at Google for not having a big enough supply of units (you pick which one -- same screaming is going on).
Google is smiling and saying "We patterned our supply model after Apple's but it wasn't nearly enough, apparently".
Apple sells 3 million units first week then demand drops off to a steady state.
Google sells 3 million units the first weekend then the demand shoots up as people realize what it is and what it is worth to them.
Apple sells at a PREMIUM+ price point.
Google sells at their cost + handling margin through the Play Store and retail partners.
Gooble isn't primarily into selling hardware units to make a lot of money. ASUS, Samsung and LG make what they normally make selling to a big telecon company, so you can see that AT&T and Version and the boys are taking a nice profit margin off of what they sell to you normally.
Now, Google and its partners are NOT taking a loss selling these units. The fact Wamart can sell the things at the same price as the Play Store says that there is enough markup in the units for Walmart to make their normal accustomed cut.
The fact that Acer can uncork a Chromebook for $199 and still have a profit margin to share with Walmart says a WHOLE LOT about the Microsoft tax that we have been eating all these years.
It also says that when the rest of the Far East suppliers kick in, the cost of a unit will go down significantly.
Samsung, LG and Acer are not "crap building" companies, and although every screen gluing issue they have had got plenty of press, there is not a lot of refurb out there to be had.
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Microsoft sales have broken 250,000 units on Win8 SurfaceRT, looking to break a million by New Years Day. Microsoft programmers are busy writing apps for the stuff as nobody else is.
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Apple is still the 800 pound gorilla in computing. Sales of 17 million IPads and 26 million IPhones were seen in Q3, with no word yet on Christmas sales figures.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/24/apple-q3-2012-hardware-sales-numbers/====================
Amazon Kindle Fire HD sales are good, but not as good as last year. Amazon is sitting silent on the Christmas sales numbers so far, merely noting that 22% of all tablets sold this Christmas will be Kindle Fires. If this is factual, then it is down from last year, but still considerable.
Also note that Texas Instruments, the chip provider for the Fire has dumped out of that business for this upcoming year.