Apple To Sell 7 Million iPads This Year?

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Market analysts at iSuppli (probably best known for their talent at taking gadgets apart and estimating the manufacturing costs) are estimating that Apple will sell 7.1 million iPads before the year is out. That’s pretty huge, considering they weren’t on sale for the first quarter of the year and they’re a bit steep in price.

iSuppli’s people are pretty high on the iPad and touchscreens in general. Rhoda Alexander, a director at iSuppli says, “Touch is the new standard for user interfaces, providing a naturally intuitive way of operating an electronic device, whether you are two or 92.” iSuppli does agree with me (and others) in that the iPad isn’t a content creation device – it’s form factor and design is for content consumption.

Although the Apple fanatics will never agree (case in point: see comments in this article), iSuppli believes that Apple has blocked Flash to encourage people to buy new Apps from the app store, versus using a free Flash web app. The average price of an iTunes app is $3.13 according to iSuppli, and with reportedly over 1.5 billion apps sold and Apple taking 30% – you can see their huge profits on the wall.

iSuppli believes that a lack of Flash is hampering the web experience on the iPad. They forecast that a lack of Flash on the iPad could hamper future sales down the road. Customers will definitely expect to use Flash on their iPad. iSuppli doesn’t believe that Apple can successfully get HTML5 installed as the default multimedia player on the web.

Despite the lack of Flash – iSuppli sees big things coming from the iPad. In addition to the 7.1 million this year, they see that doubling every year, with the iPad reaching an incredible 20 million units shipped by 2012.