Daily Monthly Apple Tablet Volume Like Competitors' Annual Volume?

There's some speculation that when pent-up demand drops off, daily orders may hit a "mere" several tens of thousands of units per day. While it's hard to imagine who these buyers might be, Microsoft's tablet volume was reported to be about a half-million a year one year into its debut. This looks like the volume Apple is likely to achieve in pre-orders. (The Kindle, which is a cheaper but special purpose device focused on eBooks, is thought to have achieved 3m in sales over its first 27 months of existence.)

If Apple ends up selling tens of thousands of units a day, this would be about a million per month – twice the volume Microsoft achieved by the end of its first year pushing tablets. Was Microsoft's effort to follow the Newton into handheld territory prescient, or premature? Microsoft took a position in 2003 on the future of handheld computing:

Previous efforts at pen-based, hand-held computing, such as Apple's Newton, ended in failure. But Microsoft executives say they are convinced the Tablet PC won't suffer the same fate. "In a couple years," said Microsoft's Loforte, "you'll be amazed at where the world's at."
"Take Note", by Todd Bishop

Of course, the iPhone hadn't been been launched yet.

Unlike Microsoft tablets, and like the Kindle, the iPad is expected to result in after-sales revenues from users' purchase of content – books, games, and other applications. In fact, Apple isn't the only company preparing to make money from Apple's iPad users: Amazon offers a Kindle reader for the iPhone and will be expected to offer its entire library to iPad users, and application developers have been working industriously since the iPad's announcement to produce products for the platform.