Piper Jaffray: iPad 2 totally sold out, 70% to new buyers | Hacker News Reader

Piper Jaffray: iPad 2 totally sold out, 70% to new buyers

tech.fortune.cnn.com

49 pointsmjfern35 comments

Dammit. Now everyone else is going to get screwed just like last year, as shipments intended for outside the US will be diverted to the US to meet internal demand. We got the shaft not once but twice last year.

The thing that persists me off is that a sale outside the US is just as good as a sale inside the US, or even arguably better, given the US currencies recent shitty performance.

Dear Apple, please don't screw over your foreign fans you inconsiderate bastards. Okay? Call me. Love you.

Yeah, it sucks to be European (I am one, too). I wonder how revenue is distributed around the world.

I remember Nintendo Wii's being out of stock in the US but plentiful around here because there was so much more to earn in Europe due to currencies. I wonder why Apple is not caching in on that? A 500€ iPad is worth 700$. This makes every low-spec iPad sold in Europe nearly equivalent to a top-of-the-line iPad sold in the US!

are there not typically more taxes that might be paid on european sales too?

If a US company sells something in the US for $499 vs selling it in the UK for 499 GBP, do they make more money? I'd guess there's too many variables to be definitive, but I do suspect that there's potentially less profit, even with a weak dollar. That 499 GBP price, for example, has VAT built-in - in the US we add tax on top of the $499 USD.

That is true only while the Euro is weak.

I lived in the US when the original iPad came out. I bought it it on day one, for 500$+VAT. At the time, that was equivalent to about 350€ (strong Euro). It was later sold in Europe for 470€ (IIRC). That was when the Euro was strong in respect to the Dollar--just like now.

Right now, 550$ are about 400€. Apple will surely not sell the iPad 2 at a lower price than the original iPad, so this makes them a handsome 80€ profit on each iPad they sell in Europe and not in the States.

Are you really sure about that?

499USD = ~360EUR. A 499EUR ipad would seem to give another 193USD profit. But... do higher European taxes negate the higher price point? That was my original point. Yes, there's more revenue, but if they have to pay more (taxes, wages, etc) it might be a wash.

In contrast to VAT in the US, the equivalent taxes in Europe are only applied to actual profits. Hence, you can directly compare 550$ (price+VAT) to 470€. The difference will be reduced by a fixed percentage (19% in Germany, 7% in Austria), but it will still be a profit.

Anecdotally, I've noticed a huge spike in app sales since Friday. So far it's a larger spike for me than Christmas even was.

It wasn't as big as Christmas, but we also are seeing a big bump in sales.

I wonder if "running out" of the cheapest sku pushes people up to more expensive models? Might make fiscal sense for Apple to release them in batches.

I'm pretty sure it would someone going out on the first weekend is really keen to get one, when you are already committed to spending $500-$600, a $100 up sell isn't going to be to hard on the part of the retailers.

From anecdotal evidence from the Stockton Street Apple Store in SF (yes, I waited in line for one), they had a lot more 16 GB models than the others but sold out of them the quickest. There wasn't that much of a problem selling the higher end models either and eventually the only models they had left were 64GB Verizon.

I don't know, people seem pretty happy to pay for the higher-spec models. Maybe this time around, with non-early-adopters playing a bigger role, price sensitivity is higher. Still, if you're dedicated enough to queue for one during launch week, you don't want to walk out empty-handed...

I've mentioned it before, but here in Vienna, the best-selling first-gen iPad was far-and-away the 64GB 3G version. (source: owner of a local Apple reseller) It was constantly sold out for months after the launch here, with the lower spec models, especially the wifi ones sitting on shelves a few weeks after launch.

It's looking like another record year for Apple, as if there was any doubt.

Considering an iPhone5 on two carriers this year too, yeah no doubt they are Sheening right now.

Maybe I'm missing something, but does anyone have an explanation for the 28%(N)/32%(Y) response to "Did you have the first iPad?" at the launch of the first iPad?

If you look up the iPad 1 column, you'll see those two figures listed for the first question. I'm guessing those first rows got copypasted and somebody forgot to change the new rows to "na."

Not sure if the 70% new buyers figure is correct as the table also lists they asked that question last year... How could anyone have had an iPad at the iPad 1 launch? The question above has N/A for last year, perhaps the two sets of results got reversed...

Wow, so many 32gb ipads. Who buys those? Seems to me you're price sensitive or you aren't, and you want disk space to dump all your stuff on it or you don't care too much. I don't quite see the use case for the middle ground.

16GB is just a LITTLE too small for a week of movies to watch for the kids.

"Apple (AAPL) ran out of 16GB iPads first, then 32BG models..." could have been a factor.

Makes sense. Those flash upgrades are, what, 80% profit? Manufacturing lots of the 32GB models early on would probably be a good decision.

16->32GB upgrade should be about 87% gross margin and 32->64GB at 74% gross margin, exclusive of the cost of inventorying multiple SKUs.

I picked up a 16GB model yesterday, but I would've sprung for the 32 if they'd run out of the 16GB models. It was probably sufficiently important to me to have a black version that I would have picked up the 32GB black iPad before a 16GB white one.

Out of curiosity, why'd you go for the black model?

I figured the white bezel would be distracting.

I use Air Video and StreamToMe for almost all my media, but 16GB can start to feel a bit cramped if you install more than a few of the larger games.

I'd still buy the $499 model myself, but I can understand why someone would think 16GB is not quite enough.

I wonder if its "second cheapest syndrome"?

https://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18811

Lots of people don't want to be seen as cheapskates, so the seller intentionally prices the second cheapest item with a very generous margin.

I have a 32GB original iPad. If you want to be able to have all the pictures you can imagine having, but don't care too much about having your music collection there, then 32GB might be a good size. iPad form factor is great for photos. It's a bit big for a music player. This was my thinking.

Another reason: if you have a 32GB iPhone, then you could sync the same content subset with both devices, which might be easier to maintain than two sets of content for both.

This is how a friend rationalized it: He wanted to buy the 16gb 3g model, but realized that some of the games e.g. fifa 2011 run close to 1G in size. Naturally, if there are 10 of these apps, you would run out of space on the 16gb model. 32 seems like a good middleground, which is what he went for

Any plenty to grey market re-sellers globally.

It's almost like Gene's team completely forgot or decided to forgo the very large global grey market that exists.

It looks to me like Apple was trying to rush the iPad 2 onto the market before the flood of competing tablets later this year. Consider the limited stock at launch, the very short delay between the announcement and retail availability, and the fact that unlike most Apple launches they didn't clear the old model from the channel beforehand.

- Apple doesn't usually clear the channel beforehand

- "Limited stock" is relative. Clearly they sold as many as they made. If they made 500,000 would you call it limited stock still? 1,000,000? 2,000,000? You just don't know how many they made.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Retail availability of Apple products is almost always reduced before new launches. The iPad 1 was easily available right up to the iPad 2 launch.

Best estimates right now are around 500k units. Given the obvious level of demand, that's 'limited' in my book.

- It's rare that stock completely bottoms out. There's a lot of tea-reading that happens with reseller stock levels near new product launch. It happened with the iPad too: http://www.gforgames.com/gadgets/news-gadgets/ipad-stock-sho...

Either way, I disagree with you. 1) if you expect that you wouldn't be able to get an iPad at all. 2) if you think the pre-low-stock talk was any different for iPad than any other refreshed Apple product.

- Estimates for 500,000 units are from Analysts who are notoriously inaccurate. The original iPad sold 300,000 units opening weekend. So if you were Tim Cook, what's your reasonable "not limited" number to shoot for iPad 2 launch based on the original sales? 2x? 3x? 10x? We'll likely find out how close you and Apple's numbers agree as the launch numbers will probably be announced.

I submitted a blog post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318747 about my theory of why apple is allowing the iPad to remain sold out today, despite knowing that people would still want one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com