250,000 AppleTVs in 18 days. Is that a lot?

On one hand, Apple’s announcement that it had sold a quarter of a million AppleTVs in just 18 days seems like a solid number.  At that rate, a million in a little over two months (and 100M in revenue!).  Steve Jobs said he was very pleased with the sales.  But is it really that many?

A few stats to consider:

• There are three times as many TVs used on earth as mobile phones, close to 5 billion.
• Apple sells 275-300,000 iOS devices a day.  Those now include AppleTVs.  Over the three week launch period, less than 5% of iOS devices sold were AppleTVs (btw, that’s up 45,000 devices a day since new iPod/AppleTV announcement)
• AppleTV, even though it has the biggest screen, is by far the cheapest iOS device at only $99.  It costs 1/5th the iPad and significantly less than half of the iPod touch.

All we’re saying is there is a lot more room for growth.  When people see what they can do with Airplay, things should pick up.