Slashdot Mirror
Heavy US Demand Delays iPad's Worldwide Release
Dave Knott writes "The international launch of the iPad has been delayed until late May, a one month setback from the original launch window of late April. Citing Apple's press release: 'Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.' International pricing will be announced on May 10, at which time international pre-orders are expected to begin."
It's only interesting that just today, along with this news announcement, was the first time when we (as in Europeans) even heard about it or when EU operators even announced iPad coming and its release dates.
Yes, there really was no announcement on release date before Apple said they will be delaying it. Marketing at its finest.
Another interesting aspect; Those UK operators were also all send the same basic marketing template they used in their press releases today.
Bar the name of the operator and the countries mentioned, the Orange and O2 statements are exactly the same as Vodafone's. So written by Apple, then, and cut and pasted by the carriers.
Can't leave any marketing aspects to be ruined by other companies eh?
And the last interesting point - iPad sales dropped down to ~10% after first day sales.
Apple - PR and Advertising.
I work for a predominate Apple authorised reseller in Australia in an engineering role, as a result I get to hear feedback from every corner of the landscape. From consumer sales, small business, big business, government and educational.
The iPad, and just the talk around it, I have never experienced in my 7+ years in the I.T. industry, and 3+ years in the Apple industry.
I have no hesitation in saying that the iPad has a huge chance of being the game changer, it's launch officially brings the "PC" into being a commodity device that anyone can use.
Hell, just today with my desk behind our retail sales floor. I've had an old lady come in enquiring about pre-ordering it, just so she can check her email in Cambodia. Schools are talking about it, business is talking about it, but the most surprising thing is that the older generation, the type of folk who see computers as these big, ugly, hard machines to use are not just wanting them, they are consistently calling us each and every day to find out the latest news on them.
Apple will sell these things like absolute hot cakes, and the rest of the I.T. industry is going to be left scratching their heads as to why they didn't come up with this idea sooner.
I note that at this moment, the front page has
-- all separate, i.e. five stories.
FUCK THIS SHIT, and fuck all the Apple astroturfers like Paska just below.
What has Slashdot editors posting Apple stories got to do with my opinion based in a market that I actively work in?
My opinion isn't some by-the-edge-of-my-seat observation, I work in the Apple industry for a company that is *not* Apple. We sell Linux, Windows, OS X, and push the right solution for the job.
The simple fact is the Apple solution is now becoming a lot more relevant then ever before, people want their products, and to ignore this (and if you want, fight it with a better/more open product) is just plain ignorance.
I brought my iPad to D&D Encounters tonight because my daughter had to come with due to my wife's previous commitment.
My daughter loves the Adobe Ideas app (she just knows it's the blue pencil icon) because it's easier to draw with and choose colors with than the other two drawing/sketching apps I have on there. She kept going back to listen to the book apps she'd already listened to a couple times that evening (Toy Story and Dr. Seuss ABCs and Alice). Her favorite is Diner Dash even though she keeps losing at the last level I mastered.
The entire D&D session was almost derailed by uber nerds wanting to use and/or talk about my iPad instead of playing D&D.
After that encounter and after my wife picked up my daughter after my wife's salon appointment (I know! what a fucking cliche, right?) I ended up having a long conversation about Apple and why I pre-ordered an iPad.
My takeaway was the only people buying and using netbooks, and the people who most want an iPad, are people who are a most perfect fit for either an iPad or a MacBook.
As someone who uses OpenBSD from a command line for most of my professional life and who turns to Apple as soon as my time is my own, I have to say I think most of the Apple hate amongst the fellow nerds here is just jealousy.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
So, first they expect to sell 700k on the first day:
http://business-news.thestreet.com/technology-news/2010/04/04/a/606016821-analyst-apple-sold-600-700-thousand/
But actually they sell 300k. Then it appears device has WiFi connectivity problems (bad routers are causing it, not apple, "obviously"). Then, after selling about 500k total they suddenly "run out of devices" and that's the reason of the "delay" in Europe launch...
PR stunts aside, I'm not surprised by this at all. Living as I do in New Zealand I can get PC hardware no problems, but if I have to buy a Mac for someone it's like pulling teeth. There's plenty of Apple resellers about touting the latest wares, but try actually buying say a MacBook Pro and you'll be lucky to see it before two weeks. If it's a recent-release you're looking at closer to six weeks. Not that it bothers me since I don't personally use nor encourage Apple products, but occasionally I have to do purchasing for work.
I'm pretty sure we're near the bottom of the distribution chain, with the US at the top. Does anyone know of the official distribution hierarchy?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The first spyware for the iPad
Right, because web tracking tools that look at browser ID's of incoming requests running ONLY ON A SERVER are so often termed "spyware".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can you not understand the concern that Apple's strategy if successful will leave them with more of a stranglehold on mobile computing than Microsoft ever had on the desktop?
Nope. Not even a little.
Because you have not thought through what happens if it's not Apple with the "stranglehold" you predict.
Apple may lock down products. BUT they do not are about hackers (they could thwart jailbreaking if they really wanted to). And they build a lot of things atop a lot of open standards - they have one of the better HTML 5 supporting mobile browsers (which they support to everyone's benefit by helping out Webkit), they have strong support for GCC and now future compiling technologies like llvm, and of course there's the BSD kernel stuff they use of the fact they ship full computers with Apache and perl and ruby and bash included.
So that's worst case, that that company has a "stranglehold" and demand the market use open standards to interoperate.
What is the alternative? Microsoft. Microsoft and more Microsoft, with Microsoft only twists on standards you have to adopt. Boo to that, I say.
You fantasy world where we boil away Microsoft and Apple cannot exist. So I choose to support giving a company an upper hand that actually supports open standards for real.
The benefit of that is, that it's very unlikely we'll see a true "stranglehold" the way Microsoft was able to execute things. Because when you are competing in a standards based world you tend to end up with at least a few viable competitors at any given moment.
As for the iPad/iPhone in particular, inside it's still UNIX as I can see from programming for it. Heck, I'm using GDB daily to debug it... and being a geek, that likes UNIX, at any moment I have the power to use UNIX tools directly on the device if I so choose. What's so bad about a world where everything works pretty well for people that don't care about the internals, but that truly technical people can get deep inside of of they choose?
the idea that opposition to the iPad is primarily "jealousy" is silly
Not from reading the plethora of extremely childish (and churlish) comments on Slashdot for just about any Apple story. For people that don't like Apple they sure do like to talk about how they don't like Apple.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, because Apple using the old artificial scarcity ploy makes it sooo successful.
1. Hype a product for months on end.
2. Intentionally sell out for a week or two to make people think your product is in crazy demand.
3. ??????. Wait. Actually you can skip 3.
4. Profit!
Analysts are almost universally wrong on any topic, so again you cannot give analyst numbers and claim they are Apple's. Apple has to be very careful whatever number they actually speculate on they can meet, while analysts can pull any number out of any orifice they chose with no repercussion for failure.
If you want sales estimates, currently Apple is speculating they will sell a bit over a million iPads in the first quarter. Tell us, do you think that is high or low? I predict that estimate to be on the low side based on current trends (and actually using the device), enshrine your guess for all to reflect on later.
Remember the 3G versions have not even shipped yet...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can't get work done on the iPad? Depends what the work is. Examples off the top of my head:
1) It seems like it's a pretty good computerised replacement for people that do work that involved carrying clipboards around.
2) Pilots are going to love it.
3) Splendid for doctors.
4) Great for sales reps. You can do an informal presentation across a desk. Or plug in a cable and give the presentation on a projector.
5) Great for students. Reading textbooks *IS* part of their work, and being able to carry a large number of them in a small package is good. Even if they have a laptop, it's good to be able to type on that whilst having the book open on a separate screen.
6) Great for anyone that needs to travel light whilst still doing some light data entry tasks. The Macbook Air is small and light, but the iPad is half the weight and significantly smaller.
etc.
No, it's a cludge, which is exactly my point. There's no way to have a proper touch-screen UI (i.e. press your finger to the screen to indicate the required action) that supports hover. You either have to have a touch-then-touch-again to click, so that the first touch is registered as a hover, or you have a tap-to-click, then tap-and-hold to hover. The first is a problem because you effectively have a hidden pointer (think about website where you hover over different icons to see different parts of the site) - unless you have a pointer on the screen you don't know where you're hovering. The second option has the opposite problem - you have to keep you finger (or stylus) on the same spot and then try to see through the stylus or hand to read the text. _Hover does not work_ on a tablet OS.