New iPad sales top 3 million: Apple

The new iPad is off to a blockbuster start, according to Apple exec Phil Schiller. 

Apple has logged its "strongest iPad launch yet," Apple exec Philip Schiller said in a press release this week. 

According to Schiller, within three days of the release of the new iPad, three million iPad units had been sold. In other words, Apple unloaded approximately a million iPad tablets every 24 hours – enough to earn the iPad what Schiller termed "blockbuster" status. (By comparison, TechCrunch notes, Apple sold just 300,000 units of the original 2010 iPad in the first day of sales.) 

And things are just looking up for Apple, UBS analyst Maynard Um said today. In an investor note obtained John Paczkowski of All Things D, Um predicted that Apple, which is in the process of rolling out the new iPad to 24 additional countries, could sell an astonishing 12 million units of the latest tablet before the end of the current quarter. 

The new iPad has received high marks from critics, who reserved special praise for the tablet's high-resolution "retina display." 

"This display is outrageous. It’s stunning. It’s incredible," gushed one critic. "Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you can hold these beautiful images in your hands, or maybe it’s the technology that Apple is utilizing, or maybe it’s the responsiveness of the operating system. But there’s something almost otherwordly about how good this screen is. For rendered text or high-resolution images, it just looks like a glowing piece of paper."

Read our full iPad review roundup here. 

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