Here in Germany, Media Markt is the Teutonic equivalent of American big box retailers like Best Buy. Considering Amazon.de usually manages to ship the same items overnight for free anywhere in Germany at vastly reduced prices, there’s not much reason to remember the existence of poor old Media Markt, which is what makes it so downright bizarre to me to discover their name plastered all over the gadget feeds in connection with the Apple Tablet.
Supposedly, Media Markt accidentally “leaked” the name, price and ship date of the Tablet on their Twitter account. According to the (swiftly deleted) Tweet, the Tablet is called the iPad, it’ll ship on March 1st, 2010 and will cost €499 with a €120/month T-Mobile contract or €899 without one.
Short of the name (I will eat an extremity if Apple is creatively bereft enough to brand the Tablet with the similar to iPod and — in some dialects — identically pronounced moniker, iPad) that all sounds plausible enough… but, uh, no. Media Markt doesn’t know when the Apple Tablet is coming out or what it’s going to cost. I’ve actually seen their employees hooting and hopping around the latest iMacs with all the insight and grace of Hansel and Derek Zoolander. I refuse to believe that whatever administrative assistant they’ve got hammering out updates in the company’s Twitter account knows more about the Apple Tablet than the New York Times.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
