We’ve presumed for some time that Apple would follow its blockbuster hit iPad tablet with another version sometime in early 2011. Now comes word Apple’s main supplier will start shipping the iPad 2 at the end of February, according to a Taiwan-based industry publication Tuesday.
Initial shipments by Foxconn will number 400,000 to 600,000 and follow reduced production of the original iPad to between 1.6 and 1.8 million tablets, the publication reports. Apple preferred to begin shipping the new iPad in January, but continued tests of the tablet’s firmware delayed the schedule.
However, the DigiTimes report stresses that while shipments of the second-generation iPad would begin in late February, the new version would not be launched and begin selling until April.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
