How many Apple (AAPL) iPads will be sold in 2012?

Daily Infographic.com took the consensus estimate of 56.2 million and then asked this question: Just how much is 56.2 million iPads? In size, laid out end to end, they would stretch from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., to Manhattan Island in New York. Then back to Cupertino. And then halfway back across the country.

The calculation comes as part of a big graphic of giblets on just how big Apple has become. What prompted the graphic was how fast Apple has grown in recent years.

In calendar 2011, Apple's revenue was $127.8 billion. In fiscal 2011 sales, which ended at the end of September, revenue was $108 billion. That's up 65% from the the year before and 18 times its fiscal 2002 revenue of $5.7 billion. It also shows how big the December 2011 quarter was.

Here are some of the other fun bits:

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How many iPads are being sold? In the first 72 hours of release, Apple sold about 3 million iPads. That works out to 694 iPads a minute, or 11 iPads a second. A baby born today who bought 100 iPads every day would be 82 when the purchases totaled 3 million. The initial exuberance has worn off, however. Apple sold 11.8 million iPads in its second quarter, January through March. That's a sales rate of 90 a minute, or 1.5 a second.

How many Apple devices now use the Apple IOS operating system? 200 million. The operating system, developed in 2008, is used in Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPads. How many cars were built in the world over the same period? 213 million. That's for all manufacturers.

How much would all the iPhones sold in 2011 weigh? First, the answer on the number of iPhones sold in 2011 is 72 million. The weight: almost the weight of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which weighs about 10,000 tons. The iPhone represents about 40% of Apple's business right now.

How big is Apple's revenue? $127.8 billion in calendar 2011. Daily Infographic compared that number with the gross domestic products of all the nations in the world. Apple's revenue is bigger than the GDP of 160 countries. Bigger than those of New Zealand, Slovakia, the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka and Ecuador, to name a few.

Its market capitalization today is $550 billion, bigger than that of Exxon Mobil (XOM), PetroChina (PTR), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A). (Microsoft owns and publishes Top Stocks, an MSN Money site.)

One thing about the revenue. It's big. Bigger than those of 160 countries. But Apple's revenue still trails the revenue of very Big Oil. Exxon Mobil's 2011 revenue was $486 billion. Chevron's (CVX) came to $253.7 billion. Royal Dutch Shell's revenue was $470.2 billion. Revenue for PetroChina: $316.5 billion.