Okay, not happy with Apple right now....how can you not start shipping for 3 to 5 business days at the beginning of launch day? That's crazy! I got up early and ordered as soon as they became available on-line and it still said the shipping date was 3 to 5 business days and arrival slated between March 18-25th. It only took 3 hours for Apple to begin pushing the ship date back to 2 to 3 weeks. To me, this says Apple hyped it all up and didn't prepare by having enough on-hand at launch....this must be why they didn't allow pre-orders. Way to go Apple...get us all excited only to have to wait even longer!!!!
Well:
1. Hopefully they're like
Amazon and are conservative with shipping estimates and actually ship sooner.
2. A problem this time is probably that that the stock is split across so many models. Original launch was just the 3 wifi models. This time there are 18 different models across color, storage capacity and the two 3G providers. So that's going to make it harder to get specific models than at the iPad 1 launch unless they have ton more.
3. If I'm wrong on number 1 above, then I have a feeling that Apple really wanted the hype of long lines at retailers and just sent the vast majority of stock there if the delays are really 1-3 weeks before any online orders start to arrive.
If so, that sucks, and means they went for hype/publicity over customer satisfaction. They should have just done preorders a month or so before then they'd know what models to make to satisfy initial demand.
But my guess is most of us will get our iPads sometime late next week.