Uh, that's a chart of the total cumulative sales, so just by the nature of the chart, it's going to make the early years look terrible. The raw numbers[1] were:

Uh, that's a chart of the total cumulative sales, so just by the nature of the chart, it's going to make the early years look terrible. The raw numbers[1] were: 376K in 2002, 937K in 2003, 4.4M in 2004, and 22.5M in 2005. That's growths of roughly 300%, 400%, and 500% after the first year. That says to me while everyone may not have known about it right away (Apple was still the plucky underdog, instead of the $700B overgod), people were pretty quick on the uptake once they really got to see it. Anyway, even if you didn't rush out and buy an iPod for whatever reason, it was pretty obviously a very cool piece of gear that people would want. "Want" doesn't necessarily mean "buy". I want a McLaren P1, and I know a lot of other people do as well, but they will only sell 375 of them, ever. That's why I would put it in my first category along with the iPod. [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarte...