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."
Thank god! (Score:2, Informative)
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].
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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
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"But they have the same capabilities."
Uh... my desktop and notebook are touchscreen portable tablets???
Wow! Thanks for the heads up!
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"But they have the same capabilities."
Uh... my desktop and notebook are touchscreen portable tablets???
Wow! Thanks for the heads up!
That whooshing sound you hear is the point the other user made flying over your head.
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It's just that Apple locks you out from using your device and restricts you to their App Store so they can milk even more money from you.
The reason for the app store is not primarily as a revenue source. It's to make the iPhone (and iPod touch and, now, iPad) more appealing. The same thing is true for the iTunes Music Store in relation to the iPod.
Re:Thank god! (Score:4, Interesting)
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].
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.
Re:Thank god! (Score:4, Funny)
-- all separate, i.e. five stories.
Someone needs to submit a story about this.
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FUCK THIS SHIT, and fuck all the Apple astroturfers like Paska just below.
Blame the haters, too. 670+ comments in the last 5 iPhone/iPad related stories. 1,470 if you go back only two more. Slashdot is ad driven and ads are served even if you post just to complain.
It reminds me of a friend I had that'd corner people in their cubicles and endlessly complain about how he never had time to get any work done.
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Paska is Finnish and means Shit if translated to English.
The iPad will redefine the industry (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Yes - because nobody else ever thought about a pad device before. Nobody.
Sure - Apple may have gotten it right. Form factor is important. You can look at the iPod as an example (and for all the mocking - CmdrTaco's analysis was dead-on... at least on the points it touched). You can also look at Apple's Newton vs. the Palm Pilot. And so Apple may have managed to do it right. But please - let's not get too carried away. This is evolution, not revolution.
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Evolution is revolution. What I wouldn't pay to have all the other consumer junk I have done right. Having a design that I not only like on day one but am not cursing a year later, if the device hasn't died by then, is absolute revolution.
It's very possible Apple has done this right. And I agree - doing it right matters. Again - Apple had the Newton but it just wasn't the right form factor. Palm wasn't doing things THAT different than others, but Palm got it right with their Pilot and that changed the market. The iPad could very well be the Palm Pilot of it's time.
But even if the iPad changes attitudes towards mobile computing, it's not doing things that weren't fundamentally done before. It isn't that nobody has even thought of doing t
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.
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While your critique is valid, it's fairly obvious he meant "appliance".
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:Not it is not (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not it is not (Score:4, Informative)
Of course. Which is one of the things that proves my point. People are already using touchscreen devices for work. The iPad will also be used for work.
MAY require? Policy MAY require that they use the iPad issued to them to fill out the form on the exterprise app its supplied with.
Which just shows your ignorance of flying planes. Pilots have been buying apps to help with piloting planes since the very first PDAs came out. It's not a distraction from piloting, it *IS* piloting. And pilots already use such apps on the iPhone. Regardless of what you in your ignorance would prefer they do.
Now that's the dumbest thing you said, because a look at the tech specs would have shown you that the iPad comes with a dock connector that you can plug a VGA or composite video cable into. Just as you could with the iPhone and iPod touch before it.
Furthermore, of course theres an app for that. Keynote, part of iWork. Announced the same day as the iPad. Available the same day as teh iPad came out. Better than Powerpoint. And again if you'd bothered to look you would have seen that output via VGA or composite cable is specified as a feature to be used with that app. http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/keynote.html [apple.com]
Yes, they're good for light data entry tasks. Which is why I said as much. But a letter is certainly within the easy capability of an iPad's touch screen. You just wouldn't want to spend all day writing letters on one.
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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.
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Funny thing is, I believe Jobs was responsible for both those quotes.
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Bullshit. The Segway quote was from Dean Kamen.
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Here's what Jobs thought of the Segway:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html [hbs.edu]
I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
But... Slashdot has already declared the iPad a failure!
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!
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A technical, hardware, software, and geek usability failure maybe;
A technical, hardware and software failure? Ooookaaayyy... what evidence do you have that there are technical problems with it, that the hardware and software is faulty? Or that it's hard for geeks to use? In other words, just what the hell are you talking about?
Translation... (Score:5, Funny)
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! "
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selling them (Score:2)
I went to the Apple Store at Park Meadows, CO on Saturday to have my iPhone repaired, and while I waited at the Genius bar I observed one guy selling (upselling really to the 64Gb unit) an iPad to an older couple.
He sold them Applecare, and then the Genius returned having repaired my iPhone (some cables were loose and yes it has worked perfectly since the repair (I was skeptical)) gave me back my iPhone.
I went and tried out the iPad. I did not leave with one. However, the young hipster couple to my left did
Superiority complex (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Mature people will use any tool that works well, knowing full well that these are few and far between.
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No, mature people accept there are tools for the job and they get the job done.
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.
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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?
I still think most GUIs are fundamentally wrongly engineered. Not only is there no text interface to them, there's often no interface to the event stream at all. It all has to be done with compiled OO languages, hugely platform-specific binary interfaces, and callbacks, which compared to the scripting power of a good CLI - or even to the original Smalltalk/Dynabook vision - is just... wrong is the only word for it. The whole messy overcomplicated paradigm 'works', but only in very limited cases and in spite
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The only reason that HTTP is "text-based" is because that's the way UNIX is designed and it derived from the UNIX community.
That seems like a stretch to me. HTTP was text-based largely because most other similar network protocols to date were text-based - most notably, FTP, and that one was originally spec'd in 1971, when Unix was still in its infancy - and definitely not in a state where it was usable for network servers. Indeed, the original FTP RFC (114 [ietf.org]) only mentions reference implementations on Multics and ITS.
iPad Hype (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:iPad Hype (Score:4, Interesting)
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? You may not believe that's a significant possibility, and that's fine, but the idea that opposition to the iPad is primarily "jealousy" is silly. Most geeks like Mac OS X exactly because it's a solid Unix that grandparents can use.
Can you not understand the alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can you not understand the alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Apple started the Webkit project by forking KHTML. Mainly because they weren't getting along well with the KHTML people.
Yo clearly don't know what you're talking about. Apple did not tell the KHTML people they were working on the code because the project was a secret until they launched. The project forked because the KHTML people did not want to pull all of Apple's changes back into the project because they had different design goals. This whole story about the KHTML team keeps going around because it is interesting and controversial, but it isn't really true. One guy on the KHTML team complained that Apple had not documented things well enough and it was hard to pull specific changes back into their project, which then got blown up into some sort of Slashdot frenzy about how evil Apple was being, to the point where the KHTML team was drowned out by the ignorant indignation. A coder at Apple actually went through and re-commented the code specifically to cater to the KHTML guys and gave them access to the versioning tree at Apple despite Apple's secrecy policy regarding new versions of Safari.
In short, Apple's behavior with regard to KHTML code was better than the majority of corporate contributors and far and beyond what was required by the licensing. The Webkit guys were playing nice and the KHTML guys appreciated it and people with no involvement went nuts and invented a controversy.
Apple is only supporting HTML5 video using a codec they helped write.
Safari on OS X already supports any plug-in you drop into Quicktime, including Ogg, via the "video" tag. It works right now. On the iPhone and iPad you're limited to H.264 supported by the video card for performance reasons.
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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.
I hate Apple because I have to administer them, and locking them down is a pain. Default settings are nothing like OpenBSD in terms of software security, and physical security is a joke (You can't lock the RAM cover on an iMac, a RAM reseat erases the nvram password, and then you're owned by a CD boot or you've had RAM stolen).
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Explain it then.
Japan launch in May (Score:2)
Orders to be taken from May 10, sales in second half of May. A month later than expected.
No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
iPad banned in Israel already (Score:5, Informative)
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:4, Informative)
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/ [cnn.com]
Could it be that people actually want products that you don't?
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
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So why aren't they pumping the Zune and Windows Mobile the same way Apple is?
For every Mac ad I see, I see at least 3 or 4 ads for Windows 7.
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...because Microsoft knows what people will reasonably buy?
Windows and Office are Microsoft's biggest money-makers, so they correspondingly have the most advertising.
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...because Microsoft knows what people will reasonably buy?
Hmm. So what you're saying, is that you need an appealing product before you throw any money at it for advertising ? Makes sense...
Simon.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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
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FTFY:
"It doesn't matter that people have been making yellow snow cones for years, no one started eating them until Apple came along, and they were the ones who popularised it!"
"You can't eat with unless you have a special cup for it, but that's a good thing, it makes the product better!"
"Apple make the best ones, even though I've not tried all the other ones on the market. In fact I wasn't even aware alternatives existed. If you tell me that Apple aren't the largest producer in the market and show data to b
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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 :)
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i think thats the reason why microsoft plans to keep winmob 6.5 alive, but rebranded as winphone 6.5.
Re:Marketing (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think much of your research. That's from October last year. The report from the same company is widely available for Feb this year, and it has Apple on 25.4% and MS on 15.1%.
http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comScore_Reports_February_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share [comscore.com]
Worldwide, they both do less well, because Symbian is still holding on ot the lion's share. Apple 15.1%, Microsoft 8.8%.
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010021.html [canalys.com]
Worst bet ever. Number of apps on Microsoft's own Windows Marketplace for Mobile = 872. Number of Apps on iTunes = 185,000.
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http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/Business+Product+and+Services/Mobile+Computers/Handheld+Computers [motorola.com]
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Nur...
He was talking % of revenue, not total spend in $, so number of product is not relevent.
Try responding to a comment you understand next time, and who could mod you as interesting?
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.
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.
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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...
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Do you want him to eat his hat now, or later?
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Could it be that people actually want products that you don't?
I won't know until I read what the pundits and advertisements say. On a related note, this isn't about marketing budgets. It's about marketing itself.
Re:Marketing (Score:4, Funny)
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/ [cnn.com]
Could it be that people actually want products that you don't?
I considered this, but it's just not likely. I mean, I can't see why they'd want it.
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I considered this, but it's just not likely. I mean, I can't see why they'd want it.
Yet the fact is that they *do* want it. So you can either adjust your assumptions and accept reality (even if you are unable to understand why things are like they are), or you can pretend, like a sizable portion of Slashdot has done, that the iPad is a failure, facts be damned.
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Microsoft spends almost twice as much as Apple as a percentage of revenue on marketing. Apple spends about the same amount as Dell.
Jerry Seinfeld isn't cheap! Then again, I'm guessing from previous examples that Microsoft gets nowhere near as much bang for their buck.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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iPad sales dropped down to ~10%
what they mean to say is 10 of the 11 people that bought one did so on the first day.
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They said "in April" and then delayed it to "May". What's wrong with that if you know you are going to be behind?
This is why companies like Blizzard don't put release dates or give out speculative info, even if they have an idea about when a product will launch. They merely say "we'll release it when it's ready"- the famous Blizzard "Soon(tm)" for product release dates.
If they say "It will ship in April 15th" and there is a delay then a horde of raging nerds go crazy on the forums about shitty service and d
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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Mobile phones and computers are sold over many millions a day.
Dell sells 365 million laptops a year?!
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.
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Re:Marketing (Score:5, Informative)
March 5th, UK - End of April launch http://www.nma.co.uk/news/apple-announces-april-uk-release-date-for-ipad/3010816.article [nma.co.uk]
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 [cln-online.org]
In a post below you said you'd eat your hat. Can you post that on youtube? Thanks.
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: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.
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.
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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 dema
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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.
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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:Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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i suspect you have no idea what's wrong, you just don't understand the balancing act OS dev's need to do.
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Actually he is pretty much on target as to why tablets have kinda sucked. I admit he did not express this opinion very well, but again he is in the ball park.
I remember playing around with an early tablet with an MS tablet variant on it a while back.
I really like the concept and we liked what we could potentially do with the device, but it's like putting the squares in the place of the circles in a peg board.
Lets look at smart phones as an example market. I have a windows smart phone and I really like it. T
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.
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Purely as a semantic question, is the positive end of the political bigotry spectrum "more bigoted" or "less bigoted?"
I guess it depends on whether you use positive in the sense of "more," or in the sense of "better."
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As I'm writing this post, Google tells me that 1 Canadian dollar = 1.0006 U.S. dollars.
What will be the Canadian price for the iPad, however? Even a few months ago when the Canadian dollar was at parity with the American dollar, Apple priced their products at about 5-10% higher for Canadians.
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Except that taxes are not part of the retail price in the USA and Canada.
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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!
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The two Theys (Score:3, Informative)
So, first they expect to sell 700k on the first day: (link to "The Street")
But actually they sell 300k (insert link to Apples press release)
How is "The Street" a spokesman for Apple? Apple never gave any estimates, so you have two totally different "theys" you claim to be catching in a restatement.
But then, I'd expect nothing less than embarrassingly misleading points from card-carrying Apple Hater.
When have analysts been good? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 th