iPads in Short Supply as Online Orders Pushed to 3-4 Weeks

[optophobia]

I do stand corrected. Since I am not a gamer, I admit I do not pay nearly as much attention to those items like I do Apple products. But, I do not think folks stood in line for a Xoom, nor for any version of a Droid phone like they did for the IPad or IPhone.

True, and I see your point.
I am not a gamer either.

 

[steadysignal]

Yeah, I'm a tad annoyed at that as well. In retrospect though, they did it for the PS3, Xbox, Wii, and basically anything else on launch day. My perverted sense of humor hopes that we see something akin to the PS3 scenario though: a huge chunk of launch PS3's ended up on eBay and flooded the market, and a lot of those resellers ended up losing money to get them off their hands.

let's hope that happens.

its disappointing that people were able to buy two per on launch day. makes me wonder why they change off last year? too many people b***hing they could not purchase for the significant other/family members at ipad 1's launch?

 

[zhensley]

In other news, I have two 64gb, white, verizon iPad 2s NIB for sale.

 

[nylonsteel]

as an aapl stock holder its great to see the demand of people lining up and inventory being bought up quickly - sorta suks for people who have to wait though - anyway ipad2 sounds like a good product update

 

[jw123]

3. iPhone 4 launch allowed pre-order but it also led to a lot of complaints from people who weren't able to pre-order, and had to wait in line for 10+ hours while watching people who pre-ordered walked into the store after waiting after only 2-3 hours. People who couldn't pre-order thought this process was very unfair to them (after all they waited all night in the cold weather). Perhaps their complaints had prompted Apple to change its policy to release in the afternoon (Better weather and easier to start the line). Also, it's fairest to everyone whether you have internet or not, whether you have heard of pre-order or not. It's very simple. We are selling iPad 2 at 5pm. If you want it, you come and get it in line.

Agreed... I reserved my iPhone 4 at an apple store here in the UK, but when I arrived at the store NO ONE knew how many iPhone's they had, if they had enough for the pre-orders etc.... The reason? Pre-order went live weeks before the release, so Apple had no idea how many iPhone's would be at each store (because they were still manufacturing them) ... So the system allowed X amount of reservations, and the store had Y amount, sure some people probably never turned up, but what if they did? ... I was near the front of the line so I have no idea if the people at the end got their phone or not. BUT I guess this is A reason for Apple to avoid pre-orders

 

[azurehi]

The longer the wait, the greater the chance the glue will have dried...huh, maybe

 

[bobsbarricades]

Do you think they'll have an upgrade program?

 

[twoodcc]

well i got 2, so maybe this will help me sell one of them on ebay

 

[ftaok]

If you don't think that Apple ultimately profits from the idea that their products are so popular that you need to stand line for several consecutive days or wait a month for mail order, I don't know what to tell you.

Of course Apple gets benefits from having lines. That's not what I'm disputing at all. Like the saying goes, "nothing attracts a crowd, like a crowd"

This is not "false scarcity"; it's "real scarcity" created by Apple, as part of Apple's overall marketing strategy.

Do you really think that Apple is intentionally slowing the manufacture of iPads on purpose? Could they have held back the launch until they had larger quantities on hand for the launch? Sure they could. But then they would have let the competition have a few more weeks of sales.

Apple had to weigh the pros/cons of launching with a "limited" supply on hand. I'm sure they have folks on the payroll that determined the optimal date to launch.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Gotta love the conspiracy theories. If apple restricted supply on openin day they won't be able to boast about launch weekend sales numbers.

Apple could have sold more on opening day than they did. So the alternative explanation is it's hard to launch a massively popular device.

In other words apple announcing they only sold 250000 iPads on launch weekend hurts them more than the fact they had long lines on opening day.

Apple does restrict product. Thats why its against employee NDA to give out stock numbers. When the first iPhone was release we had an entire stock room full of them but we were only able to sell a certain number of them on the first day. Its brilliant. What it does is it makes people clamour to buy more. Apple doesn't need to set records anymore... they are the record.