Comments on: Infographic: iPad sales fly way beyond expectations

By: Arlene Murchinson

Arlene Murchinson — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 01:59:00 +0000

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By: Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:45:58 +0000

JT – thanks for following!
I accept that trying to make this visually attractive was at the expense of understandability, though I would argue not by too much. Note that I’m not the graphic designer but I like what he did for me here.

By: JT

JT — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 06:22:23 +0000

Not trying to argue the point here, but using the iPad shape doesn’t help distinguish the predictions. Because they overlap on top of each other you are forced to make the labels overlap as well. It makes the graphic less readable and more confusing.
Your point about doing something to “break the boredom of bar charts” is well taken, but there’s a reason bar charts are so widely used. They effectively communicate the message better than other kinds of charts 99% of the time.
I’m all for trying something different, but not at the cost of readability/understanding.
I say this with all due respect and really just stumbled on this chart as I saw it in an RSS feed from an infographic blog I follow. It gave me the opportunity to have a look around your blog, and it’s piqued my interest. So now I’ve got another feed I’ll be following.

By: Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:21:04 +0000

JT – fair point, but it is nice to occasionally have something which breaks the boredom of bar charts :-) Also using an iPad shape rather than bar helps to distinguish the predictions.
JH – these are dated e.g. actual 3.27m sales by June 26, forecast of 2.9m sales by September 30.

By: JH

JH — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 23:14:43 +0000

Perhaps I’ve missed the point – but I’m a little confused by this infographic. Seems the blue actual sales completely missed the green pre-launch forecasts?

By: JT

JT — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:05:37 +0000

It seems to me this graphic would have been a lot more readable if you’d just used regular old bars.
Unless I’m reading this completely wrong or overlooking some bit of extra information, it doesn’t appear to me that the width of the current rectangular measuring blocks have any bearing on the number of iPads sold as the quantity axis is vertical. Making them wider as sales go up only serves to make the graphic harder to read.
The same is true for the predicted/estimated sales. Actually it’s worse because they are all displayed one on top of the other and are no longer tied to the horizontal time axis.
A standard bar chart would have allowed you to keep the predicted sales tied to the time axis as to when the estimates were made and also allowed more direct comparison of actual sales.
Just sayin’,

By: Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:11:58 +0000

Thanks Sarah, yes more coming soon, though focusing on iPad and media next.

By: Sarah Miller

Sarah Miller — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:18:57 +0000

Hi Ross, really like the infographics displayed above on iPads. Can we expect more like this?