Heavy US Demand Delays iPad's Worldwide Release 314
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."
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thank god! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org].
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
...because Microsoft knows what people will reasonably buy?
Windows and Office are Microsoft's biggest money-makers, so they correspondingly have the most advertising.
Re:Marketing (Score:0, Insightful)
Why do people who don't like Apple products bother to even read stories like this. I just do not understand why there are some people who feel so threatened by Apple and seem to feel outrage that there are people that do like Apple products.
Re:Thank god! (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org].
And there's generally several stories that are pro piracy and file sharing each day. Welcome to Slashdot. If you want balanced reporting you've come to the wrong place. iPhones/iPad ARE tech stories. You might not be interested but half a million people already disagree with you the first week. Will I get one? Probably not but I'm still interested in following the product. Hopefully they'll add some of the missing elements, they already are slated to add multi-tasking. It's a media/game player that can run some apps, deal with it not being a proper computer. Neither is your smart phone. I've got four computers sitting in the room I'm in. I don't need the same capabilities on every single electronic device I own.
Superiority complex (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The iPad will redefine the industry (Score:5, Insightful)
it's launch officially brings the "PC" into being a commodity device that anyone can use.
You do realize that a PC *is* a commodity device that anyone can use, right? Grandma's all over the world are already using them. In fact, if you know what a commodity actually is, the iPad is less of a commodity than a standard PC.
Re:Superiority complex (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Hmm. *Looks at the 6 terminal windows open to all the various departmental servers*.
Every tool has its use. GUI may be king for the dekstop, but CLI is king for much server administration.
Mature people argue about the best tool for a job or function. Childish people declare a particular tool "the best." Most platform argument-wars can be described in this way.
A tablet is not a PC - because the PC sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The iPad will redefine the industry (Score:2, Insightful)
Meh. All the hype around this useless toy device reminds me of the hype around the Segway. "It will revolutionize urban transportation." "It will change the way engineers plan cities." Blah, blah, blah.
Re:A tablet is not a PC - because the PC sucks. (Score:2, Insightful)
i suspect you have no idea what's wrong, you just don't understand the balancing act OS dev's need to do.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
Mobile phones and computers are sold over many millions a day.
Dell sells 365 million laptops a year?!
Re:Marketing (Score:1, Insightful)
Why does Apple have so many indignant forum warriors? Aren't you all supposed to have lives and be getting real work done?
You're not like part of a cult or anything are you?
Re:Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
People might take you seriously if you stopped creating posts exclaiming, "Your math fails", then writing (300+4*500) = 600000.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What slashdot do you read? (Score:1, Insightful)
Every "+5, insightful" comment is ALWAYS a pro-Apple, pro-iPad and anyone who dares question the hype is moderated down to oblivion, so I love the irony of you claiming that slashdot declared it a failure when the opposite is clearly true.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Superiority complex (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. *Looks at the 6 terminal windows open to all the various departmental servers*.
All residing in a GUI.
Mature people argue about the best tool for a job or function. Childish people declare a particular tool "the best."
Ah yes, the "everyone who agrees with me is mature, everyone who disagrees with me is childish" argument.
He didn't say GUIs where "the best", he said that those CLI-ers of the day that put down the GUI for being a toy or a gimmick, etc., were wrong, and tied that into the topic at hand. I didn't see any childishness in his post.
Re:Marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
There are over 100,000 iPhone apps out now. According to you, this would mean there are one million Windows Mobile apps (your 10 times). Do you honestly believe that?? I sure as hell don't :)
Same ol' Same ol' (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not it is not (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you saying that Apple will sell as many iPads in the next 10 days as it did on the huge first day? I don't think Apple has a problem with that.
300,000 in 10 days = 10,950,000 per year. Of one iPad model only, and in the USA only. That would mean at least 25 million total sales worldwide per year. Netbook and notebook makers should be very, very frightened.
Re:A tablet is not a PC - because the PC sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I think he understands that OS devs don't really think about tablet computing. None of the mainstream OSs are really suitable. Think about this - how much do you rely on 'hover'? Whenever I get a new piece of software, hovering over buttons to see the popup help / tooltip is my main way of getting to grips with it. May websites (particularly ones based on Flash) rely on hovering to reveal parts of the page. A proper tablet UI doesn't allow this, because you don't want a mouse pointer, you want the user to directly tap to indicate a click. The only way to support hover properly is to use a horrible cludge like some Windows-based tablets where there's a mouse pointer that jumps to your finger position, then lags behind as you move your finger around. You then have to take your finger off and tap again to register a click. This breaks the UI metaphor and makes it clear that you're using a poorly-adapted desktop environment.
This might sound like a minor detail, but the more you use a cludged tablet environment, the more of these details become obvious. The iPad is the first tablet that I'm aware of to have an OS designed from the ground up for fingertip usage, and that is a major development (if not quite a breakthrough). For those who were hoping for a relatively powerful general purpose computer with a unix-based OS that they could use on the bus or in a lecture theatre, it's obviously a disappointment. For the rest of the world who want to read the news and check their email whilst having coffee in bed first thing, it's ideal.
This is also one of the reason why I agree with Apple about not supporting Flash. I'm sure it's not their main reason, and is basically Jobs' brand of social engineering, but Flash relies heavily on hover - especially on websites - and Apple would be forced into cludging together a way to make that work. I think in five years, everyone will be happy with that decision, just like the decision to drop floppy drives from iMacs was ridiculed because "everyone needs them", it turned out Jobs was totally right.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Artificial scarcity drives demand (Score:3, Insightful)
As it invents the extra "caché" of owning an iPad.
There's no way the demand exceeded their expectations. Maybe with the iPhone or iPod, they could have argued this. But not now.
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not it is not (Score:2, Insightful)
However, you can get productive work done on a Mac/PC but not on an iPad. The iPad is great for reading newspapers, books, watching videos, listening to music (not at the same time yet) but you're limited to end user functionality.
A television set is also easy to use, you have an ON button, buttons to change channels and buttons to change volume. Easy! But can you actually work on it? Some people will say yes, you can watch news bulletins on it for example and see what the stock price is doing but you can't really use the device (iPad or TV) to produce anything significant. You can watch a video on the iPad, nice! However, you can't EDIT it.
Secondly, your video file has to be the exact format and profile of the H.264 codec to be playable on the iPad. So you can't really watch other videos, eg AVCHD or XDCAM that you shot on your camcorder without first transcoding.
What Apple has done is re-invent the portable telly (as The Register pointed out) with an obviously easy interface and added some other features (newspapers, web browsing, iTunes music, etc) and you have a nice end user consumer product - primarily aimed to be used for consumption of mostly Apple content. The PC/Mac on the other hand is a different ballgame. It's everything the iPad is with a less finger-friendly interface and more - you can actually WORK on it and not just monkey around and watch iTunes video clips or read newspapers. Apple has made a nice appliance device for content consumption but not content creation, a nice toy.
The trick for Tablet PC makers, I think, would be to have an iPad like interface on a device which can do the work of a PC and not a multi-modal portable television.
Re:canadian outraged. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a pile of crap! I live in Switzerland and our electronics are way cheaper than the rest of Europe (even taking VAT into account). Having French requirements is not a big deal for a multi-national corporation.
The reason why Canada is more expensive is due to the traditional Looney US exchange rate. Corporates gouge Canadians!
Waiting on a price correction (Score:4, Insightful)
because the iPhone sold like hotcakes the fist few months and then sales went flat till Apple corrected the price. Of course after outcry they refunded some money to early buyers.
I think the iPad is a great idea with some serious setbacks, like not being viewable in sunlight easily... but the price turns me off completely. $500? Get real. Make a 16 at 299, and +100 for each doubling.
oh... and can we have a version which works outdoors in bright light please!
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
i think thats the reason why microsoft plans to keep winmob 6.5 alive, but rebranded as winphone 6.5.
Re:Translation... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
I have two words for you: Nintendo Wii. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Nintendo under-produced Wii units for at least the first two years it was on the market.
Ahh, but Nintendo did not intentionally underproduce. They underestimated demand, then did not want to invest in more plants because they assumed they would catch up with the demand and did not want to be stuck with expensive production plants when they did not need that many for the long term sustained demand.
They could have immediately started building more plants, but they wrongly assumed they had misinterpreted initial demand and failed to stockpile enough. Basically, they badly underestimated the demand in the new market segment they were entering. What's amusing is that, at the time, conspiracy theorists who were not the target market spent all sorts of effort theorizing about how it was all some sort of marketing trick and the Wii was not really in demand that much, simply because they could not understand that there was a large market demand because not everyone is just like them. Here we see the same phenomenon all over again.
Re:Same ol' Same ol' (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure they are not sold out everywhere, but the point is they still see larger than expected demand in the U.S. that they want to meet. It's still a supply constraint problem even though you can find specific examples still sitting in stores.
It's more like, you can find one BECAUSE you are in NYC, where Apple obviously sent more to...