This is MacO-S Ken. Three million new iPads sold share buybacks and dividends announce and Wall Street

falls in love all over again. It's Tuesday March 20th 2012. I'm Ken Ray, and this is news from MacO.S. Ken.

Brought to you by yours truly and supported by listeners like you, subscribers to Mac OS can Day 6.

More information is available at MacOS can.

This show is also supported by the MacOS can podcast app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, available in the

App store now for $2.99.

3 million iPads.

3 million iPads in three days. That's the official word from Apple.

Monday morning Apple held a conference call to announce that it is initiating a dividend

and share buyback plan to which we'll get in a bit.

Apple had said in announcing the call that it would only be talking cash, that's all, nothing else.

But they had a short question and answer session after the prepared remarks.

So how is somebody not going to ask?

Into the breach, Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster.

The unofficial Apple Web blog says Uncle Gene bit the bullet and asked the question he knew would not. The Un saying anything officially any time soon. To this Apple CEO Tim Cook said,

we had a record weekend and we're thrilled. And that's all he had to say about that,

at least in the morning. So people spent the day guessing. The verge heard from a secret

someone at New York City's Fifth Avenue glass tabernacle that Apple sold

over 13,000 iPads in the first 12 hours of availability on March 16th.

That's an average of about 18 iPads per minute.

That doesn't get us to 3 million, though.

Since that's just one of 300-something Apple stores that probably didn't have quite that kind of foot traffic,

...