Apple iPad: Confirmed Success Already?

"One million iPads in 28 days--that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs on May 3, only three days after the 3G version had hit the market.

It may be too soon to call the iPad a "game-changing" tech success story, but the reality of that coming true gets closer by the week. With soaring sales, huge gains as an e-reader, deep cuts into a flourishing netbook market, and sky-high customer satisfaction rates, living up to all the pre-launch hype has been the biggest challenge for the iPad.

According to RBC Capital Markets, the iPad is currently selling approximately 200,000 units per week. The high demand and extreme popularity of the device has pushed it to the number two position in Apple sales, ahead of Mac sales at about 110,000 units sold per week, and just below iPhone sales which are still going strong at a rate of 246,000 units sold per week.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster recently checked in with 50 U.S. Apple retail stores and found that the iPad had sold out or is in limited supply at many of them, reports AllThingsD. Various other analyst's are predicting a range of five million to six million iPad units sold to be sold in its first year alone. [via PCWorld.com]