Observations from more than 24 Apple Stores over the past couple weeks have shown that Apple are maintaining good sales of Macs and iPhones.
During the end of March and early April, analyst Gene Munster and five members of his research team spent 25 hours in Apple Stores all over the country counting how many customers left the store with an iPod, iPhone, or a Mac.
Gene Munster concluded that on average, each of the Apple Stores across the nation are selling approximately 22 iPhone 3Gs, 28 Macs, and 50 iPods per day. Meanwhile, sales of 22 iPhones per store is down from 28 iPhones per store during November, which suggests a 21 percent decline in sales sequentially compared to the Street's view of a 24 percent drop.
However, Munster is betting that expanded international availability will help offset some of these domestic declines and is therefore modeling iPhone sales for the March quarter to be relatively flat at 4.4 million units.
For the first time in the history of its Apple store surveys, Gene Munster also counted daily iPod sales but didn't report on its findings in detail due to a lack of comparative data from previous rounds of checks, saying only that sales of the digital media players were "slightly more than twice" the volume of iPhone 3G sales.
So Apple Stores across the U.S. are obviously not selling as many iPods, Macs, or iPhones as they were back in November of 2008, the Holiday Season, but their sales now are still considered in the "Healthy Zone".