Apple has sold out of initial supplies of the new iPad in every country where it will launch the tablet on Friday, and is now telling buyers that orders will not ship for up to three weeks.
In the US and Canada, all iPad pre-orders placed through Apple’s online store will now ship on March 19, three days after the on-sale date. Customers who placed an order very early in the pre-sale process were told they will receive the tablet on Friday, 16 March.
Some consumers have received e-mails confirming that their tablets have been shipped.
Hong Kong’s online store simply says that the new iPad is currently unavailable.
US carriers AT&T and Verizon, both which will also sell the iPad, are only taking customers’ e-mail addresses for later notification when the tablet is available.
The tight supplies and resulting delays were not surprising.
Last year, the Apple iPad 2 sold out on its first day of availability in the US, where shipping delays changed several times on opening day, first from two to three business days, then five to seven days, and finally settled on two to three weeks.
In an April 2011 conference call with Wall Street analysts, Tim Cook, at the time its chief operations officer, called demand "staggering" and admitted orders were bogged down in the "mother of all backlogs." Not until the mid-point of 2011’s third quarter did Apple claim iPad 2 supplies had matched demand.
More recently, analysts predicted that Apple would face a repeat of the problem, in large part because suppliers of the new model’s higher resolution screen have had difficulty getting high yields from their lines.
The iPad is scheduled for release in Ireland on Friday 23 March but as of this morning there was no option to pre-order it from Apple’s local webstore.
IDG News Service
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