iPad 2 Weekend: 70% Buyers New to iPad? Individual Resellers Ship Internationally
The iPad 2 launched on Friday to massive lines and quickly became sold out. Fortune reports on a surveys conducted by Piper Jaffray's Gene Muster surrounding the iPad 2 launch.
According to Munster's survey of 236 respondents in New York and Minneapolis lines, he found that 70% of iPad 2 buyers were new to the iPad. Assuming this survey can be generalized to the iPad 2 buying audience, Munster believes this high percentage of new customers as a positive sign for Apple's continued growth in the tablet market:
"We believe this shows Apple is expanding its base of iPad users, which is critical to maintaining its early lead in the growing tablet market. As the user base grows Apple's lead widens, and the company has a proven track record of building unmatched brand loyalty, which we believe will be a potent combination as the tablet market evolves."
Meanwhile, one of the reasons that the iPads were in such high demand on opening weekend was due to international resellers who were buying up as many iPads as possible to ship to other countries.
MICGadget profiles one such Hong Kong reseller who took orders for 200 units before the launch and prepared eight couriers in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles to stand in line and then hop on a plane back to Hong Kong. The reseller was marking up units to $1025 for the base 16GB Wi-Fi model and up to $1525 for the Wi-Fi/3G 64GB model.
ChipChick also was contacted by a couple of different Russian resellers who had a similar scheme with up to 8 line-holders in place in New York City to buy the early iPad 2 models.
Apple is expected to replenish stock on Monday to its retail stores. Online ordering is still available but new orders are currently seeing 3-4 week delays.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....