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Analyst estimates 16.5 million iPads sold by 2012

Apple sells 3 million iPads in 80 days, and one analyst has upped his sales prediction for the upcoming coming years.

Jim Dalrymple Special to CNET News
Jim Dalrymple has followed Apple and the Mac industry for the last 15 years, first as part of MacCentral and then in various positions at Macworld. Jim also writes about the professional audio market, examining the best ways to record music using a Macintosh. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. He currently runs The Loop.
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Apple on Tuesday said it had sold more than 3 million iPads since it was released 80 days ago. That works out to about 37,500 iPads every day since it was introduced on April 3.

Apple iPad
Apple

Of course, that's an average number--some days, like during opening weekend, were a bit higher than others. Still, that's not a bad average. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, that's up from 34,000 per day when Apple hit the 2 million mark.

"Using Apple's frequent unit sales updates we know that the daily run-rate has varied from 37.5K per day [at U.S. launch] to 23.9K per day [throughout April, given limited U.S. supply] and has risen to over 45K per day between 2M and 3M units," said Munster in a note to clients.

With those numbers in mind, Munster said he expects Apple to sell another 200,000 iPads in the June quarter, which ends on June 26, giving Apple an estimated total of 3.2 million iPad sales for the quarter.

Munster is also raising his estimate for iPads for 2010 and 2011. He originally estimated that Apple would sell 6.2 million iPads in 2010 and 8.2 million in 2011, giving Apple 14.4 million iPads by 2012. Munster now says Apple will sell 7.5 million in 2010 and 9 million in 2011 for a total of 16.5 million iPads by 2012.