iPad 2 News: The Five Worst Ways Apple Botched the iPad 2 Launch

Posted Mar 20, 2011 at 10:54PM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: iPad 2 News Tags: apple, ios, news

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Limit sales to one or two iPad 2s per customer. If you order from Apple online, you’re only allowed to buy two items at a time. And since they have your credit card info and shipping address, there are ways to catch you trying to cheat. So why are grey-market crooks allowed to stake out the front of the line at an Apple store, swoop in and buy a bagful of iPad 2s with cash while those who’ve waited for hours go home disappointed? Enforce the same standards as for online orders—one or two iPad 2s per customer, credit cards only and no coming back once you’ve bagged your limit.

Don’t launch until you have at least a million units in stock. This should have been a no-brainer. If Apple could sell 300,000 units of a brand new, untried product in one day, it’s obvious that they could move at least twice that many of an item that’s already in demand. It’s not like there will be leftover stock gathering dust on the shelves months from now.

Don’t let competitors push a premature launch. Apple could easily have released the iPad 2 in April and been right on schedule. Instead, they debuted the next gen tablet in early March and it’s been a disaster. Nobody could have predicted the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but if the iPad 2 hadn’t yet gone on sale, the shortages caused by the tragedy would have been easier to deal with.

Do better quality control. People who’ve waited for hours to get an iPad 2 do not want to get it home and find a yellow blotch on the corner of the screen. Problems like this should have been fixed before the iPad 2s went on sale.

Do a better job of distributing inventory. If you’re going to claim that the iPad 2 is going to be sold in 10,000 stores, make sure that each of them has more than five units. Potential customers outside major urban areas should not have to run all over town from Best Buy to Target to Walmart trying to score the model of their choice.

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