As a current employee in a connected store pilot program out of the Pittsburgh district, I would almost guarantee this article holds little to no water. Yes, Apple did get the contract with Best Buy to create our mobile pos's or cash register for us employees to carry around on the store so we can ring people out in a quicker fashion and look up other product information and use our employee intranet on the go. Though, the idea of EVERY store getting 5-10+ ipads for sales people to use, carry with them, drop, lose, steal, etc. is sorta absurd. Obviously they would not buy 118,000 ipads, but somewhere around the 8000 mark would be the logical number, is still a ridiculous cost for Best Buy. I do know we have 1, again 1, ipad that salespeople or management are carrying with them on the floor to give demos with or look up information. Though its nothing more than an ipad, not like the ipods I described before with the special design and apps. Plus, we do already have tablet computers we can tote with on the sales floor that are basically our mobile kiosks. They pretty much are useless to be honest. Im sure Best Buy would rather just put more work into the tablets we currently use rather than buy ipads. In addition, if apple retail stores don't have store ones for their employees, I could see no reason why Best Buy would get them.
Finally, just to reaffirm what someone said earlier, yes all the devices we salespeople use on the floor have to be signed out on the sales floor by management at the beginning and end of our shifts and every specific device is numbered and tracked basically. So, if anything like this really would happen, that just confirms that stores would only get a certain amount, rather than one for every single employee.
