The new iPad 2 has arrived, sort of. It made a brief appearance last Friday in Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) stores and a few other retailers. But by Saturday the only place you could find one was either chained to an Apple store table as a demo model or clutched in the hands of a neighbor who decided that getting up in the wee hours to stand in line on Day One was a sensible thing to do.
Ordering online didn't necessarily mean instant gratification either. Some extremely early orders have come in, but by the second day, delivery times had stretched to three weeks. Now it's more like five.
So yeah, it's once again a hard life for desperate Apple fanboys and fangirls. But they've been here before. Every time Apple puts out a new iObject there are lines, shortages, riots. The company never seems to have enough on opening day, and that might be strategy, it might be accident, or it might be one big mistake.
Obviously, if you leave customers waiting long enough, they'll just go somewhere else. With the original iPad, there was really nowhere else to go for a tablet, but now several other choices with certain degrees of similarity to the iPad are out there, ready to go, and others are just around the corner. The Xoom is one big rival, and by the end of this month, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) says it'll start selling a WiFi-only model that will be competitive with iPad 2 on price.
Or are shortages all part of Apple's master plan? Make it harder to get, make people line up for it, make 'em beg for it, and suddenly it's more desirable than if you could just pick one up at a Fry's any time you please.
Perhaps a shortage tends to have that effect on some people's perception of the product, but I don't know that Apple's intentionally choking its own supply pipeline. The things are built in a factory by incredibly hard workers, but Apple has to play the calendar just as hard as everyone else. It needed to get it out there fast in order to claim new buyers and get them hooked on a brand in a market where most loyalties haven't been established yet. Some analysts estimate that more than two-thirds of iPad 2 buyers do not own an original iPad.
Also, there's a gaping maw of demand that just isn't evident for a lot of other products. Did you see lines for the Xoom or the Galaxy Tab? On the other hand, maybe lines just form because people think there will be a shortage. Kind of a chicken-and-egg thing, I guess.
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