Apple Sells 90,000 iPads in the First Day?

The iPad officially became available for pre-order earlier today and while plenty of you are still debating about whether or not to pre-order, it appears as if the device might already sold 51,000 units in just two hours via pre-order. Wow.

If you’ve ever doubted how dedicated Apple fans are, the background on how these figures were determined will assuage any doubts. A group of particularly prudent Apple fans from the APPL Sanity Board at Investor Village decided to put together a spreadsheet of order numbers, times that orders were placed and contents of those order. As someone who has been known to obsess over Apple details myself (tracking a freightliner from China to the US with 27″ iMacs on-board in order to better guestimate delivery time), my hat is off to these folks!

Using this information, they were able to come up with a baseline for the number of items being sold through the Apple Online Store.

Fortune’s Phillip Elmer-DeWitt reports:

“51,000 orders in two hours,” announced Victor Castroll shortly after noon. He’s an analyst with Valcent Financial Group and an AAPL Sanity member who, with the blogger-analyst who calls himself deagol, has been monitoring the spreadsheet.

This matches other estimates from blogger Andrew Erlichson who wrote:

“We just bought two iPads, about 30 minutes apart. Our order IDs are 10,000 apart. Assuming those order IDs are sequential, and they appear to be, then Apple is selling 20,000 iPads per hour.”

Now as with anything unofficial, there are caveats — major ones — assuming that the order number system has been identified and “cracked” so to speak, this would really be more accurate for all orders placed through the Apple Store, not just iPad orders.

Additionally, these figures wouldn’t account for orders with multiple iPads (you can only pre-order two at a time). This also doesn’t include any reservations to pick up an iPad at a local store (no payment information is required for that and you aren’t given an order number).

Still, it’s safe to say that the majority of orders placed through the Apple Online Store are for the iPad.

I’ve reached out to Victor Castroll for a more recent update and will update the post if I’m able to get any more information.

Update: Victor Castroll from the Valcent Financial Group and AAPL Sanity got back to us with some numbers that account for approximately the first 6 hours of sales. Here’s what he tells us:

“We’re at 90k in 6 hours. Keep in mind, this doesn’t include multiple orders but we have some dirty data from regular Apple business which now is about 4k orders out of the 88k orders. So, we estimate Apple has already sold about 90k today, not including in-store reserves.

“$54 million in revenue in a quarter of a day is a great opening. Looks like contrary to much speculation about who would actually want one of these, like the iPhone, people are voting with their wallets. Considering these are just pre-orders for a product still three weeks out, iPad is home run.”

Indeed, 90,000 pre-orders in just one day is extremely impressive!

Update 2: Deagol, the guy who is behind the number crunching is now reporting that a conservative number for iPad first-day pre-orders is 120,000 units. WOW.

Additionally, Deagol has offered more information about the methodology he uses to estimate sales:

… This web order sequence of course includes all Apple products sold through the US Online Store. But for today, this is relatively insignificant when compared to the iPad orders. The average daily order volume from January 16 to March 5 was about 16 thousand orders per day. From March 5 until to the first order submitted after the store opened today it was about 14.5 thousand per day.

Amazing! If you want to contribute to the sample, send your iPad order number with the last three digits removed (just use XXX for them), the exact order time from your order-confirmation e-mail and time zone to ipadsales10@gmail.com. Include your iPad specs (size, 3G or WiFi only) too so that the types of orders can be better analyzed.

Christina Warren March 12, 2010