Analyst: iPad Sales Will Reach $1 Billion By June

If Apple can maintain its current iPad sales rate, by the end of May it will have sold 1.5 million units and reach the $1 billion mark, according to Carl Howe, director of Yankee Group's Anywhere Consumer research group.

"Apple’s iPad will likely take the crown for the fastest consumer product growth to the $1 billion revenue mark in history, taking less than 80 days from the beginning of pre-orders to reach that milestone," Howe wrote in a Wednesday blog post.

Howe assumed an average iPad price of $645 and noted that the 16-GB Wi-Fi model and the 64-GB models appear to have been the most popular models.

Apple has crowed about selling a million iPads in less than half the time it took to sell a million iPhones. Apple hasn't yet begun reporting revenue from sales of the iPad, which began on April 2, and it hasn't even started selling the device outside the U.S.

But while it's tempting to assume that iPad sales will drive Apple's financial results even higher, this probably isn't going to happen right away. For starters, Apple has priced the iPad aggressively in order to build market share in what it sees as a new category of device.

"We think the market for the iPad will be large and we want to capitalize on our first mover advantage," Apple COO Tim Cook said in a Q&A during last month's earnings call.

Of course, this comes at a cost: Cook also said next quarter, Apple expects gross margin to drop from 41.7 percent to 36 percent year-on-year due in part to its low iPad pricing.

Another factor is that the iPhone has already given rise to an App Store that now features more than 200,000 mobile applications. The iPhone has blazed the trail for the iPad and that's something that needs to be taken into account in any forecast of where iPad sales are headed.

"By the time the iPad shipped, everyone had a sense of what it is, as most people imagined the ready advantages of a larger iPhone,” Al Hilwa, program director for Applications Development Software at research firm IDC, told CRN earlier this week.