last weekend was the 2-year anniversary of a 3-year "wager" which michael hart and i made way back on april 21st, 2010. i'd posted "longstanding question has finally been answered", a message noting that the ipad -- on the verge of release -- had answered the frequently-debated question as to whether general-purpose machines or dedicated e-readers would win. the 300,000 pre-orders for the ipad were convincing to me... but michael differed, saying dedicated e-readers would prevail. we eventually settled into a bet where he made me pick a date when the number of ipads would surpass kindles/nooks/sonys. i thought it would be from 1-to-3 years, max, so i said that...

http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/private/gutvol-d/2010-April/006648.html

and so the wager was formalized...

http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/private/gutvol-d/2010-April/006659.html

http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/private/gutvol-d/2010-April/006660.html

i said that ipads would outnumber sony/nooks/kindles on 4/21/2013, and michael (for some reason) bet the opposite. *** along the way, i also made another post full of predictions:

http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/private/gutvol-d/2010-April/006652.html

kind of interesting to go back and look at how close i was... *** anyway, 2 years in to our 3 year wager, apple just announced its results for the quarter that concluded at the end of march. they sold 11.8 million ipads in the quarter, for a grand total of _67_million_ since the debut of the machine 2 years ago... pretty sure that dwarfs the other machines, even if you were to add in all the other e-readers and tablets, even combined. the ipad is an absolute juggernaut. apple's market cap -- which is now #1 -- has grown to nearly $600 million. (exxon, #2, hovers solidly around $400 million.) *** at any rate, i miss you, michael. -bowerbird