Yesterday, Apple Bitch broke the news that Apple Stores would be opening an hour early today to start selling a new shipment of iPad 2s to customers. Today, they’re noting that while many stores did open early in case they had iPad 2s to sell, most stores received no new iPads at all… and those that did only got an extremely limited number of units (less than half a dozen).
I can personally confirm this, as I went down to Boston’s Boylston Street Apple Store this morning an hour before opening time. While the Boylston Street Apple Store did did have staff waiting at the door at 8:30am, nearly an hour and a half before opening time, they confirmed that they had no new iPad 2 units to sell when asked, and suggested checking back the next day at the same time.
Overall, if you haven’t ordered an iPad 2 already, it looks like we’re going to see an extremely constrained number of Apple Store iPad 2 units for the next month at least. However, reports indicate that the store will put any new units up for sale first thing the next morning after their delivery, so if you want an iPad 2 sooner rather than later, calling in late for work might be the only way to get one.
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.
24 responses to “Report: Apple Store iPad 2 Supply Is Still Extremely Limited”
“Yesterday, Apple Bitch broke the news that Apple Stores would be opening an hour early today to start selling a new shipment of iPad 2s to customers. “
Bitch broke?
I suspect that after a week of this they will flip to reservations. that way they can stop having cities and malls pissed at them over the crowds and noise.
You might still have a wait but at least you know that when you come in it is cause you got an email and you definitely have a unit.
Which in my opinion is how they they should have just done it. All reservations, scaled to what the store can handle each day, no walk ins.
Why would people care about crap made by apple when they could get some really powerful gear for less money? Odd…
http://bit.ly/dI3hcF
The On-line Apple Store now shows a wait of 4 to 5 weeks for al flavors of the iPad 2.
Like the underwhelming Xoom with it’s stale graphics power and error prone OS? haha Try again.
Glad i waited 2hrs last Friday to get mine, ITS GREAT!!!! the only way you can get an ipad right now is to pay more than its worth on EBAY, i think that’s where they all went….greedy sellers brought them all.
Your right i saw this tablet in Best Buy- its not attractive like the ipad at all, plus its heavy and costs $800 for that much, you just as well get a new flat screen tv.
I went into a Verizon store this morning at 10:15 am and bought an iPad2 64g 3G Verizon version. I intended to order it but I think the salesperson was just as surprised as I was to see she had two black faced ones in stock. If you want a 3G version I would try the AT&T and Verizon stores first.
I managed to snag one this morning at the Austin pop-up store. 64GB was all they had in black, so I spent a little more than l intended, but it’s a pretty awesome device and a definite step up. I got there about 8:30 and was gone at noon. Overall not a terrible experience.
Wow, and the Xoom has 6 apps!
All IPADs were sold out by 9:20 on March 16th. No news on a shipment for March 17th.
“those that did only got an extremely limited number of units (less than half a dozen).” – that’s not true of all stores; I was at the Upper West Side Apple store in NYC when it opened on the 15th, and they had around 100 iPads in stock (they were almost sold out by the time I got to the front of the line, but that was almost 2 hours after the store opened, and I’d estimate there were about 100 people ahead of me in the queue).