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Steve Jobs: iPod touch more popular than Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined

By , Thursday, Sep 2, 2010 at 8:57 am
25

Yesterday during Apple's annual Special Music Event Steve Jobs announced that the iPod touch was more popular than both Nintendo's DS and Sony's PSP... combined. Jobs also said more than 1.5 billion games and entertainment apps have been downloaded by iPod touch devices to date.

However, as every gadget and gaming blog has since pointed out, while iPod touch has sold in the mid tens of millions of units (Apple doesn't often break them out), Nintendo's DS series has sold 132 million all on its lonesome, so take this with a "biggest mobile company" type grain of salt.

[Engadget, thanks also to Freaknasty]

Rene Ritchie

Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.

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  1. Matt says:

    There are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics.

  2. theguy says:

    Ok...so wtf is up with the "can has mercy!?" That crap is irritating.

  3. Massie says:

    The first paragraph is missing something: 1.5...million? Billion? It must be huge if he's claiming to outpace the DS and the PSP.

  4. sting7k says:

    I just wonder what stat Steve was talking about because to date the DS has 130 million units world wide. All iOS devices combined, of which there are 9, have sold 120 million as he said yesterday.

  5. Luuk van Dongen says:

    @ Sting7

    What Jobs ment was: At this point there as many ipods being saled as there are psp's and DS's. He didn't mention total sales.

  6. Hoffa says:

    I don't see how apple can go so hard at the gaming angle. The others or built mainly for gaming and so is the battery. The iPhone etc can play games yet it will kill your battery quick. That's one the reason I don't play games to much. I know the battery may be bigger but I had a psp and use to get 8-10 hours of use playing games vs iPhone where I might only get a hour and a half of battery life. The psp phone may give them a huge run for the money on that front very soon. I wonder what kind of battery life that thing will have

  7. Yeah when I first heard Jobs' comment I had to shake my head a bit... I know the iPad has done very well but it hasn't been out THAT long. Now if it just had a bigger battery and Flash... yeah right!

    Kick Butt

  8. Mike says:

    Throw me in the bunch that believes Mr.Jobs was wrong about outselling the DS. The DS is owning everyone in handheld gaming section.

  9. Joel says:

    one and half games sold is a LOT!

  10. Jerry says:

    THat's like Sony saying We sold more PSP's than Zune.. just because PSP's can play music doesn't make it a Music Device..

  11. Erik says:

    "What Jobs ment was: At this point there as many ipods being saled as there are psp’s and DS’s. He didn’t mention total sales."

    Which is a pretty stupid thing to gloat about since the DS is near EOL and Nintendo is currently prepping its next-gen replacement.

    PSP has always been weak and Sony really shot themselves in the foot with their PSPGo release. Probably why their next device seems to be a gaming phone, to get carrier subsidies and compete with Apple for those $2-$5 games instead of Nintendo's $30 games.

  12. Chris says:

    Steve Jobs sure seems to be doing a lot of “revolutionary” story telling. Or to be blunt telling flat out lies! What’s up with that???

  13. Rick says:

    Keep in mind too not everybody buying the Ipod Touch is buying it for the games. Maybe people like the form factor over the Classic, maybe they want safari, or just apps not games. To count every Ipod Touch sold against every DS and PSP is foolish and it is not accurate. Does every PS3 count as a blu-ray player? Everybody I know who has bought one doesn't own a single blu-ray movie. Capability doesn't mean the device was sold for that usage. Misleading "facts" as usual.

  14. lol who would of thought that. im just waiting for the new ipod touch 4g

  15. وظائف says:

    apple ipod is very greate i like toooooo much

  16. very nice article anyway thanks alot

  17. Robert Najafabadi says:

    iPod Touch sucks as Ganming divice and so do the Games. The games are to short and level are to easy. iOS ganes are low end pc ports and flash fakes. For me to goes concell mobile concell pc then mobile phone. But I would love concell games on my iPod Touch.

  18. Bryan says:

    Hoffa, you need to brush up on your English.

  19. TK says:

    I can see that the iPod touch being more popular than the PSP but not the DS, not by a long shot. The DS has Mario and Pokemon, nothing is more popular than those two on that system.

  20. thomas says:

    这篇文章提到" Jobs also said more than 1.5 billion games and entertainment apps have been downloaded by iPod touch devices to date." 我接触到的资料中说,其中15亿的软件中有80%是免费的.也就是说能得到收入的至少有20%.每个游戏的低价为0.99美元,那20%的软件的收入就是3亿美元.此文中还提到:"任天堂的DS系列已经售出了1.32亿美元." 由此显而易见3亿远远大于1.32亿.其实国内的ipod手持设备销量不大...因为价格原因...nds在3大主机中是最便宜的...在国外几本看不到多少人玩nds,更没有人去买psp了...就拿澳洲来说,无论在火车上,走在路上,坐在车上,甚至于车上的导航仪(iphone破解之后可以装免费的导航软件)都是apple的产品.国内对apple产品的普及率不够高,主要原因有以下几点: 1.wi-fi不普及(每台能联入wifi的无线设备都需要有相关政府机构的贴标认证,这需要很长时间的处理和很多钱,不信的朋友可以看看笔记本电脑背面的入网许可) 2.价格偏高(这是主要原因) 3.软件使用复杂 4.苹果对于中国的目标客户群定位不准导致客户流失(苹果基本没有促销和降价) apple的产品对于我们国人来说可能不算是一样成功的像神迹一样的产品,但是不可否认的是,apple的产品在鬼佬的心中远远超越psp和nds.也许在少部分国人心中它的地位也远远超过了psp和nds.

  21. richie says:

    psp is the best system imean its slim it has diffrent colors better games lik gta and final fantsay its like amini ps2,ps3,ps1 and it has movies playstation store and internet and more suckaaa.

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