Want an iPad 2? Be Prepared to Wait

People wait in line to buy an iPad 2 outside the downtown San Francisco Apple store Friday. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

It turns out that even a relatively minor upgrade is enough to make Apple fans wait in line.

Outside the Apple store in downtown San Francisco, between 200 and 300 people were queued up by noon Friday to buy the second-generation Apple iPad. The line stretched the length of a city block, around a corner and halfway up the next block.

The line outside the flagship Fifth Avenue Apple store in New York encircled an entire city block by 4:30 p.m. Eastern, according to The New York Times? Nick Bilton. The first person in that line reportedly sold her spot for $900, according to Mashable.

That?s pretty impressive for a product whose first version sold 15 million units and whose second-version changes have been called ?unremarkable.? Yet, lining up on the day a new Apple product launches has become almost a tradition, with lines sprouting up for the first iPhone, the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 as well as the first-generation iPhone. It?s a trick that other consumer electronics manufacturers would love to replicate ? but almost none have (with the exception of Sony?s PlayStation 3 launch).

The iPad 2 goes on sale in Apple stores at 5 p.m. local time. The Apple website began taking orders Friday morning at 4 a.m. Eastern time.

The first person in line in San Francisco, Joshua Leavitt, had been there since 4:30 a.m. He?s being paid to purchase iPads for two customers of TaskRabbit.com, a bid-based system for getting other people to run your errands for you. He?ll be getting $40 to $50 for each of the two iPads he?s buying, Leavitt said, for a total of about $100 for a full day of standing on a chilly San Francisco street.

?I?m otherwise relatively unemployed, and it is a heck of a better way to spend my free time than making no money at all,? Leavitt said.

Apple employees were confident that everyone in line at that point would be able to purchase an iPad, so even those arriving at noon would probably be in luck. (Apple limits customers to two iPads each.)

But for those arriving later, it?s not guaranteed that you?ll get one. At some point, Apple employees in San Francisco said, they would hand out tickets to everyone in line who?d arrived early enough to get one.

Waiting in a long line may not be necessary. If past product launches are any guide, the company will continue to restock its retail locations daily. Getting to an Apple store early on Saturday, Sunday or Monday and waiting in a shorter line may be the easiest way to get an iPad 2 at this point.

Alternatively, if you?re not in a hurry, you can order online at the Apple site. The site is currently quoting delays of two to three weeks to deliver iPads ordered online, which is roughly comparable to the delay shortly after the first iPad launched.

After that launch, shipping delays gradually declined as Apple filled its retail pipeline, according to a graph published on iPadJailbreak.com.

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