They say a sucker is born every minute. Well, on Saturday, 300,000 suckers paid around $500 to be the proud owners of an oversized iPod Touch that can’t even connect to the Internet without a WiFi hot spot.
According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, over 300,000 of the WiFi iPads were sold on Saturday. That estimate includes the iPads that were shipped to customers who pre-ordered.
Apple would have rolled out the 3G iPad on Saturday had AT&T not begged them to hold off for fear of crashing the broadband service and disrupting signals to millions of cell phones.
The iPad sales eclipsed the July, 2007 first day sales of iPhones by 100,000. But iPhone sales were limited to one phone per person back then. The iPads did not exactly fly off the shelves as analysts had predicted. Many Best Buy stores around the country report unsold iPads remaining on the shelves.
One Atlanta area Best Buy that I was in on Saturday (launch day), had several iPads sitting out on a table around 9 p.m. — and many more in the storeroom.
No one picked the units up until I started playing with one. As I turned the iPad over to look at the back, the slender unit slipped out of my hands and crashed onto the table. It wasn’t damaged, and I’m sure my grip would have been more secure had I paid $500 for it. But just the idea of carrying around something the size of a dinner plate just to surf the Internet when a handheld iTouch does the same thing, is ridiculous.
The iPad mania shows just how easy it is to create high public demand for something worthless by taking advantage of people’s insecurities and low self esteem.
Sales of the iPad will probably taper off as soon as people figure out they’ve been suckered in by the Apple hype machine.
Apple’s CEO, Jobs predicts the iPad will be a game changer. But if you recall, Jobs also said the two wheel Segway was a game changer before it debuted back in 2001.
In fact, the massive hype and build up leading up to the debut of the Segway was covered by all the major news networks because Steve Jobs said the Segway was the greatest invention since the Internet. He said the Segway would change the way we looked at transportation.
The only thing the Segway changed was the way mall cops get around the mall.
