Ready to get over your skepticism about Apple’s iPad and place your pre-order? Go ahead, but if you haven’t already ordered you won’t get an iPad until April 12 at the earliest, Apple’s online store indicated Friday. People who placed pre-orders before March 27 will get their iPads on Saturday, April 3. If you order this week, you’ll get a new iPad on April 12.
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Apple retail stores around the country indicated that pre-orders have already exhausted their supplies. A store in Portland said if customers don’t claim their iPads by 3 p.m. on April 3, the units will be put on sale to walk-in customers. They’re not expected to last long, though.
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Apple blogger Daniel Tello is estimating pre-sales of 240,000 iPads in the first two weeks the public has been able to order the machine. Pre-orders were 120,000 the first day and 190,000 the first week, Tello says.
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High Expectations
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Tello’s estimates are based on user-submitted web order numbers. On the first day of pre-sales, Tello compared overall daily sales compared to sales on more normal days. He figured the baseline for online orders for all products at 600 per hour.
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Yet for the first six hours since the store opened, we’ve seen the sequence increase by more than 88,000 orders in total. That’s the baseline daily volume, per hour! For the last two or three hours the rate has moderated to about 7,000 per hour, from more than a thousand per minute in the first 15-20 minutes, he wrote on March 12.
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While such educated guesses are rife with the potential for error, Apple has never publicly set sales goals for the launch. Clearly, though, Apple CEO Steve Jobs expects great things from the iPad. Perhaps even more than with the iPhone, Jobs believes he has a machine that can live…