At some point this has to stop—one analyst said Thursday that Asian components makers think Apple will ship 45 million iPads this year and later in the day another said she's heard figures of as high as 60 million from those sources.
Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner research vice-president for mobile devices, told PCMag.com that in talks with component providers, "the numbers we have been told vary from 40 to 60 million."
Gartner's own forecast for global unit sales of the iPad in 2011 is 47.9 million. For the full tablet media market, which also includes non-iOS tablets running the Android, MeeGo, WebOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS operating systems, the research firm projects 69.8 million units sold worldwide for this year.
Milanesi cautioned that makers of different components that go into Apple's iPad and iPad 2 offer different views on the raw number of units that will get built, shipped and sold for the entire year.
"Depending on which supplier you talk to about iPad screens versus memory versus something else, the numbers go from 40 to 60 million, so you need to take those numbers with a pinch of salt," she said.
Earlier Thursday, Apple Insider quoted a Ticonderoga Securities analyst as saying that his Chinese and Taiwanese component sources claim that Apple will ship as many as 45 million iPads this year. That's about 15 million more than Ticonderoga Securities and other financial houses currently forecast.
The analyst, Brian White, said he had heard similar numbers put forward in the fall of 2010.
Another industry research firm, IDC, is currently forecasting total worldwide media tablet shipments of 50.4 million for 2011 including "more than 30 million unit shipments of the iPad," said IDC media tablet analyst Susan Kevorkian.
IDC forecasts global media tablet shipments of 70.8 million units in 2012, while Gartner, projecting sales rather than shipments, offers a figure of 108.2 million.