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"Apple Inc.\nFORTUNE &amp;#8212; It used to be the iPod that got Americans started down the road to dependency. Now, according to a new NPD survey,\u00A0their first Apple \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tAAPL\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t product is more\u00A0likely to be an iPhone or, increasingly, an iPad.\nTo quote the NPD press release:\n&amp;#8220;While over 70 percent of long-standing Apple owners began their relationship with the brand by way of the iPod, this number declines to just 57 percent among those entering the Apple franchise in the past two years.\u00A0 Newcomers to the brand increasingly turn to the iPhone or iPad as their first Apple device, which combined account for one-third of first-time Apple purchases since 2010.&amp;#8221;\nThat makes sense. iPod sales slowed to 7.7 million units last quarter. In the same period, Apple sold 35 million iPhones and nearly 12 million iPads, up over 150% year over year.\n\u201CiPad sales are growing much faster than any other Apple product has this soon after launch,\u201D says the NPD&amp;#8217;s\u00A0Ben Arnold. \u201DIn fact, one-in-five Apple owner households has one\u2014 nearly equivalent to the number that own an Apple computer.\u201D\nAccording to NPD,\u00A033% of U.S. homes, (37 million households) own Apple products.\nYou can think of the iPad as the new Apple gateway drug, although the company prefers to talk about its &amp;#8220;halo effect.&amp;#8221;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2012/04/26/the-ipad-as-gateway-drug/>