The numbers are starting to roll in, and it’s becoming clear that Apple had a pretty good holiday weekend. Waiting for the iOS maker under the Christmas tree on Sunday was a gigantic pile of new customers, who promptly starting buying apps, playing games and shopping, according to a bunch of stats released Tuesday.
Here’s what we know so far about how Apple did this past weekend:
- People like shopping on their shiny new iPads. An IBM Coremetrics study tracking Christmas Day e-commerce found overall online shopping on Sunday was up more than 16 percent from last Christmas Day, and the dollar amount spent just from purchases made on a mobile device jumped 173 percent. But most interesting is that 7 percent of all purchases made on Sunday from a mobile device were from an iPad, the highest percentage among the mobile devices used to shop. The IBM study tracked spending on 500 websites (excluding online retail king Amazon.com).
- Dec. 25 was the best Christmas ever for iOS and Android activations combined. For the first three weeks of December, between 1.3 to 1.8 million devices powered by iOS or Android were activated each day, according to Flurry Analytics. But Christmas Day saw 6.8 million activations, a 353-percent jump compared the rest of the month. It was also a huge leap over the 2.8 million Android and iOS devices activated last Christmas.
- New iPad and iPhone owners got down to using their devices right away. On Christmas Day, playing games and using iOS apps was up 12.5 times compared to the previous weekend.
It’s looking like Apple is on track for that record-breaking quarter top company executives predicted back in October, though we won’t find out definitively for a few more weeks.
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