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Apple COO Tim Cook revealed an iPod-sales statistic at Wednesday's Goldman Sachs Tech conference: "For last quarter in the U.S., 40 percent of iPods sold were sold to people who did not own an iPod. In thinking about this number, this doesn't feel like a saturated market to us." The vast majority of my (admittedly gadget-loving) friends have bought several iPods over the years. I'm on my sixth, if you include my iPhone. Even my mother has had two and is thinking about a Shuffle. Just how many people bought an iPod last year? And how many were new to the white-earbud cult? Here's our rough estimate.

NPD says $6.3 billion was spent on MP3 players in 2007. Pricegrabber reports the average player price was $169. This means roughly 37 million MP3 players were sold in the U.S. last year. Apple says it sold 52.685 million iPods globally in calendar 2007. Apple doesn't break out international versus U.S. sales, but we know that 45 percent of Apple's revenue comes from overseas. Using that number, and reports of Apple's market share at around 70 percent, we estimate that Apple sold 27 million iPods in the U.S. last year.

So, 27 million iPods sold in the U.S. last year, of which 10.8 million — 40 percent, assuming Cook's numbers hold up throughout the year — were to new iPod owners. 303,534,374 people in this country, and Steve Jobs managed to convert just 3 percent of them this year into iPod owners.

Apple has shipped a lot of white earbuds — more than 141 million globally — but Steve Jobs has a long way to go. Better step up those ad campaigns.

(Photo by AP/Ben Margot)