Everyone panic! Quick, get your food storage in tip top shape, board up the windows, and make sure you have shotgun shells on the shelf! Apple might not have enough iPads to meet demand on release, so you might find yourself having to protect your shiny new object from the dozens of Apple users who’ve been left out in the dark.
Many people are speculating that the delay for the iPad might be because of a lack of product parts. They say a bottleneck might be to blame for the predicted February pre-order deadline passing by without a mention from Apple. It’s production issues they say, so Apple might be limiting the sales to the US, and they might only have 300,000 of the devices available.
Yay for Canada. *eye roll*
John Paczkowski over at All Things Digital site seems to think that the product release could be delayed for an entire month while Apple tries to stockpile as many devices as is humanly possible for the release day. Taking advantage of consumer excitement is going to be huge for Apple. If they can pull it off, they’ll have excellent sales on release day. If it’s a limited release, and earlier adopters rail on the device, just like they did with the iPhone, Apple could be in for a world of hurt.
Let’s file this under lessons learned.
The first lesson here is companies shouldn’t make announcements for products they aren’t ready to ship yet. Some might be able to pull it off, but for a company like Apple, which has a lot of early adopters lining up, it’d be in their best interest to make sure they’ve procured enough devices to meet demand before they announce a release day.
