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."
Microsoft spends almost twice as much as Apple as a percentage of revenue on marketing. Apple spends about the same amount as Dell.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/28/apples-2009-ad-budget-half-a-billion/
Could it be that people actually want products that you don't?
iPad sales dropped down to ~10%
Well, at least they're right about exceeding sales expectations. That's way more than I expected anyone to buy.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Microsoft has 4 to 5 times the amount of products apple does and a much higher profit margin as they don't ship hardware, would be far wierder if they didn't spend at least double what apple do.
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.
But... Slashdot has already declared the iPad a failure!
#DeleteChrome
Yes, there really was no announcement on release date before Apple said they will be delaying it. Marketing at its finest.
Well here in Australia they where saying it would be released at the end of April, it has now been changed to late May.
Wow, you would really have to be blinded to not see through this.
Every other Apple product release in the past they have done exactly the same thing.
I'll eat my hat if the same PR isn't released during the next Apple product release.
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.
And the last interesting point - iPad sales dropped down to ~10% after first day sales.
They sold 300K the first day, including all the pre-orders, then about 50K every day thereafter, according to the published numbers from Apple. So more than 10% of the first day, but I guess I don't see the relevance. Since market researchers are showing it is sold out in many stores, so constrained supply limits sales in some cases and reduced demand in others. Until they start to keep up with the demand, we won't really know what that demand is like. By the same logic as you've presented you could claim the Wii was going to be a failure since after the first day sales dropped dramatically. Actually, the numbers are slightly lower (500K vs. 600K), but close to that of the iPhone when it was released. To claim the iPad as a success or failure at this point, especially because of the distribution of sales is, well, premature.
Here are a few press releases before this press release:
March 5th, UK - End of April launch http://www.nma.co.uk/news/apple-announces-april-uk-release-date-for-ipad/3010816.article
March 5th, European release - End of April launch http://www.cln-online.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=612:ipadrelease&catid=40:industry&Itemid=135
In a post below you said you'd eat your hat. Can you post that on youtube? Thanks.
Suffice to say, we can probably get 3-4 rounds from these same people....maybe a USB port for the 3rd go round? Boy, will they lap THAT up...."
" For round 4.....we'll rumor Flash compatibility, but not deliver it, of course.....we'll please the masses with a custom Steve Jobs signature edition, complete with virtual-arrogance, and disdain for all things with pre-emptive multitasking! "
Exactly. You can sell Ice to Eskimo's. You just need to value add! Look! Yellow snowcones. What?!? It's lemon!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This reminds me of when GUI's were new in the mid 80's, all the elitist jerks who fancied themselves to be high-caliber nerds loudly proclaiming that it was all a gay bullshit fad, etc., ad nauseum. Lemme ask you guys, any chance we'll get a humble redaction if it turns out you are completely and utterly wrong about this?
Facebook is the new AOL
I did get one a decade ago. It sucked. All the ones I've had running Windows or Linux sucked. I've considered a Mac-based one but I expect it'd suck. Why? Because desktop OSs are crap and are triple crap for a tablet. Also without good multitouch, small form factors, good battery life, and wireless tablets are crap.
If you've never noticed that EVERY desktop environment available is crap then you've obviously never used a computer or helped anyone else use a computer. iPhone OS is still pretty lacking but it's better than any version of Windows, Mac OS, KDE, Gnome, etc that I've used. I have seen some stabs at a netbook environment that were moving in the right direction too but they all were still more concept than reality. Keep the OS simple and let applications provide whatever level of complexity is needed to complete a given task. As iPhone, Android/Chrome, etc move towards a task/document centric approach instead of application centric and find the right middle ground for safe/easy versus flexible I think we'll all be a lot happier.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Exactly. You can sell Ice to Eskimo's. You just need to value add! Look! Yellow snowcones. What?!? It's lemon!
If Apple sold lemonade-flavored snow cones, here is how Slashdot would react:
"Oh please, people have been making yellow snow cones for years!"
"You can't eat with unless you have a special cup for it! (Well I don't know if that's actually true but it sounds plausible!)"
"I've never tried one, but I know they're not actually sweet! Steve Jobs just told them to like it! Sugar is just a marketing term they made up."
"If you go to the Kwik-E-Mart you can get other flavors, too. If you look hard enough, you can even buy them from your neighbor's kids from their stand down the street! They don't taste as good, the quality is not as consistent, and the coloring will run down your sleeve, but you have choice!"
"Heaps and heaps of people only by them so they can show off their yellow mustaches!"
... etc.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It seems strange to be so self-righteous about marketing, in a forum on a site that is basically a big community PR platform for VA Linux. It might seem like it fosters open debate, but overall the selection of issues and the guidance in the summaries is strongly tilted toward facilitating dialogue about how awesome Linux and the GNU interpretation of open source are, with a regular diet of Apple/science/general tech stories to draw in new readers.
Everybody markets, and you are constantly acting under marketing's influence. Marketing's awesome! You saw the TRON trailer, right? That's marketing.
You're wearing denim jeans right now, right? Marketing.
You may fancy yourself an expert on a few things, capable of making objective decisions, but in most aspects of your spending life, I assure you, you're responding to very basic stimuli induced on you by marketers. And it's completely legal, legitimate, fair, and even necessary.
This continuing slashdot obsession with disqualifying goods (from any manufacturer) because they're well-marketed is bizzare.
You shouldn't be asking why Apple is so effective at marketing... Apple is merely competent. You really should ask yourself, why, if HP and Dell have such good products, they invariable allow their products to be introduced as blurry pictures on Gizmodo or Ars Technica, give them unrememberable names, and are so inept in their follow through and promotion that anybody who actually cares to develop or add value to their product might as well blow their brains out now and save the trouble.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Except that's not true. Apple announced that the iPad would begin worldwide availability late April.
Yes, there really was no announcement on release date before Apple said they will be delaying it. Marketing at its finest.
No, they really did. Your post is ignorance at its finest.
And the last interesting point - iPad sales dropped down to ~10% after first day sales.
I assume you mean down to about 10% per day, which is a number much lower than I've heard, but regardless of the specifics, this is exactly what always happens. There's the initial rush (including pre-orders from a month ago), then things settle down to a more sustainable level of demand.
There's also the little matter of Apple not being able to keep the iPad fully stocked, which places an upper limit on sales numbers.
Instead of trying to spin reality completely backwards, why not admit that the iPad isn't the dud you and those who mod you up thought it would be? What's wrong with admitting the truth? Is your technological self-esteem so insecure that it must be propped up by hiding reality lest... Lest what? Will your Windows PC or Ubuntu netbook or Android tablet serve you any less well if you admit that there are many other people out there that prefer the iPad to *your* device of choice?
Apple - PR and Advertising.
And profitability and shipping millions of products per year. Apple is the fifth largest PC maker in the US, and that includes businesses which skew much more heavily towards Windows PCs. Even then, Apple sells 8% of all computers in America.
That does not support your "PR and Advertising" smoke and mirrors claim. There's substance to back up their flair. Unlike your incessant posting of ignorance on all things Apple.
If Apple sold lemonade-flavored snow cones, here is how Slashdot would react:
But there would also be a new article about them every day for a month. :D
It is what it is.
Every other Apple product release in the past they have done exactly the same thing.
You mean the other products that really were such successes that supply was constrained?
Unlike other makers Apple doesn't stuff the channel (see: Palm. Sigh.) , they try to build only what they estimate they will sell. So when they underestimate, they run out.
So to say they are doing the same thing is correct, but not your odd assertion this is some kind of marketing move. People are coming to Apple with money and Apple is having to send them away, never a great thing for a company to have to do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You do realize that a PC *is* a commodity device that anyone can use, right?
Your definition is basically: anyone can have one and type into it. That's what you MEANT.
But what you SAID is - "anyone can USE".
And that is simply wrong. Not just ANYONE can USE a Windows computer, certainly not a Windows tablet which takes an extra level of geekery to grok the oddnesses of.
The key is USE. For many years the industry has failed on the front despite things like WebTV and Windows Home Edition and Bob, which generations now of computer geeks have had to help maintain or set up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In bizarre move Israel Ministry of Truth... err Communications banned iPad. Custom officials already confiscating iPads at airport. Incompatibility with Wi-Fi standard given as the reason. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1162992.html
Not to play semantics, but "late April" is not a "date".
But you *are* playing semantics. sopssa's point was that Apple wasn't delaying anything, because they didn't make any initial statement to begin with. Late April and late March are so different that there's no way to claim that there was no delay, which is exactly what sopssa claimed.
Stock has not been a major issue.
I never said it was a major issue, I said it had an effect. And it has.
Some stores have run out, but then gotten more a day or two later.
Exactly. In other words, some people walked into an Apple Store, and were unable to walk out with an iPad. This, by its very definition, means there's an upper limit to the number of sales which is being bumped up against. This is especially relevant as the topic was about the number of sales daily compared to those on the launch day, when stock was significantly higher than it is now.
At any rate I don't know if Apple has any supply issues or if this is just marketing, and neither do you -- but If I had to guess, I'd guess its probably just marketing.
You're absolutely wrong that this is simply marketing. It would be absurd for Apple to deliberately not have enough iPads (or hold them back in warehouses) for the sole purpose of making it look like demand is super high, because this would mean lost sale after lost sale. It would also mean that Apple is deliberately under producing (or under selling).
This absurdity would be doubly compounded by the delay to international markets. Why would Apple then parlay lost US sales into delayed foreign sales?
To be sure, there would be some benefit to have the buzz be "ooh, look, demand is so high that Apple can't keep up with it!", but to sacrifice actual sales for such hype would not only be absurd, but also illegal. Apple's shareholders would not allow 1/3rd of a quarter's sales to be completely vanish for a little bit of hype.
And contrary to common belief here on Slashdot, Apple doesn't live on empty hype. They *do* benefit from hype, but from hype that is backed up by reality. It's far more effective to have the hype of being unable to keep up with demand because demand is actually high, than it is to have it hyped up, but demand actually be low. If Apple tried the latter, the iPad would get a short-term media boost, but the market would clobber it in the long run.
There's two possibilities: It's marketing or apple *failed* to gauge the market and organize their production chain effectively.
Or they are producing them as fast as they can, and that's just not fast enough.
They've had other product launches exceeding a million units sold in the first week, so this quantity of iPad's is easily something they could handle.
Which Taiwanese factory do you know of that can churn out iPads fast enough? We're talking IPS LCDs, large glass multitouch surfaces, custom SoC, high capacity batteries (that aren't simply a bunch of AA cells shrink-wrapped together), high capacity, high speed flash memory, etc.
And they are also having to ramp up production of the 3G iPad, so units of those are accumulating for their launch.
Given everything you just said about Apple, which do you think is more likely: They dropped the ball and didn't handle the launch intelligently, or they're doing the smart thing now and trying to increase demand?
Why would they have to do something like you are suggest in order to increase demand, when demand already exceeds production?
The simple fact that far too many slashdotters can't grasp is that people actually want iPads. You clearly haven't been to an Apple Store over the past week. They are packed with people gathered around the iPads.