It makes me wonder. I suspect she wouldnt mind having a play with one as I've never shown that much interest in them. Although to be fair to her she does like to treat me to things like this - she bought me my Xbox 360 and some of my camera goodies.

Is there a reason the Xoom is excluded from the FSAA tests? Also in the interests of fairness the Xoom runs a higher resolution and different aspect ratio than the iPad.

Still, given the resolution is (presumably) fixed if I wanted a device for OpenGL performance I'd have to go with the iPad 2.

I thought the same thing.

Maybe it doesn't do FSAA?

In fact a quick google found this...

http://www.glbenchmark.com/subtest_resu ... oom&id=406

Another conclusive result I think.

I quite fancy an iPad 2. I may have to wait a while though. They are selling well and I don't think production has ramped up to full capacity yet.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chi ... ?id=183150

Yes the delays are already climbing, and they have yet to launch in a the other twenty odd countries. The delays will be enormous.

ooh isnt it amazing every launch has massive delays and shortages.. its almost as if they deliberatly ensure they have a shortage to ensure maximum interest.. or am I being too cynical.

Funnily enough, you can still buy a Xoom if you want one. And the Tescos near me had shelves full of Galaxy Tabs...

As it happens, if you are willing to believe the multiple decent journalistic sources that have said so, they sold as many iPad 2's in the first 24 hours as they sold iPad 1's in the first two weeks, so it's not entirely a surprise stocks are short. It's not unusual for consumer gadgets to sell out on orders and initial sales. I'm pretty sure the Nintendo 3DS will sell out for example. As will...um... well actually I can't think of any other high profile gadgets that are due out soon right now...


but well, you know, selling out = fail? Only in the world of internet forums.

Selling out on a high profile "gadget" = more headlines, drives the idea that it is a sought after product drives sales.

I predict iPhone5 will sell out as well as iPad3. It could be that im just a cynical git.

True, I also predict that despite selling out and being pretty scarce for the first 3-4 weeks of sales it will outsell most (if not all) other phones on the market.

It may be that you are right and by selling out it creates headlines etc...

But either way, it works.

I'm with you on this. Of course the items have to be popular to begin with but the "selling out" doesnt exactly harm their popularity does it

The recent-ish products I've known to be difficult to get were the original Xbox 360, iPhones, iPad, Wii and various DS models/games so I'm not just pointing the cynical stick at Apple. For me it's simple - make more=dont sell out, restrict supply="sell out" and increase media hype and demand. They surely knew the iPad2 was going to be a big seller?

There may be an element of underestimating demand, but I with Apple I suspect that it is deliberately engineered shortages to keep interest alive. Last time it was months before the iPhone 4 was available in sufficient quantities.

The thing with the iPhone 4 I can kind of see technical justification for being low stock - the retina display is quite unusual as is the glass shell, so they wouldn't have huge manufacturing capacity for those initially. If you think about it, your stock is limited to the production rate of your rarest component. The fact nobody else has any phones using the same display suggests Apple is buying all that can be made of them and therefore selling all that can be made of them.

I can't think of a similar justification for the iPad 2 - most of the major components don't seem all that different to the iPad 1, so you're talking about minor retooling rather than setting up whole new production processes and lines. So there's no 'bottleneck' on iPad 2 production as far as I can see.

However, I have to come back to the demand level. They sold One Million of the things in what, 48 hours? That's going to sell out most things. Yes, it's almost certainly better to underestimate demand rather than overestimate it from a PR point of view but that's still an absolute [lifted]load of boxes out the door. if they could sell 1 million, they probably could sell a few more if they'd wanted to, still sell out and still had a very positive story.

Personally, what I think happened is this : in the meeting where they planned the iPad 2 launch someone picked a good number off the top of their head : say 1 million units. They looked at the production schedule they had, and set the iPad 2 launch date to the day when they could have 1,000,000 units in stock in shops. if you look at the date, there was nothing special about the iPad 2's launch - it wasn't a holiday, it wasn't any sort of anniversary of anything... No, it was just when they they had as much stock as they wanted to have, for whatever reason, and that was the day the iPad 2 went on sale. I don't know if they thought it would sell out. I don't know if they planned it to. I don't really care either way to be honest, but the tinfoilhattery about it is kind of laughable.

Note of course they put 1 million into the shops in the US while presumably keeping some back to launch in 24 other countries in two weeks. So they've probably actually made several million. Be interesting to see what the sales figures look like in the EU...

Jon

Putting a million into the shops to see how fast they sell will guarantee publicity when they sell out, though I doubt that they have put any aside for the rest of the world yet. They will probably be ramping up production as soon as they can for other countries.

The figures will look very good. The buzz is there. The stock will be sold out very quick and demand will still be there.