Why Apple Released the Retina iPad Mini Softly

Ed Dale:

By soft releasing the iPad Mini Retina, Apple achieved three crucial things.

  • Apple’s biggest fans got theirs first. Who knew about this first? The people who follow the Apple blogs and digerati. Judging by Twitter, this worked perfectly.

  • The grey market queueing for the iPad Mini Retina was going to be immense. By going online the incredibly poor optics (the front of Apple lines, which attracts a lot of media, was full of people who were not fans but paid to be there) are mitigated.

  • The last thing Apple wants is hundreds of customers turning up everyday to be disappointed in a store which is meant to be a happy place — Apple does not want their stores to be associated with disappointment and frustration!

Bingo. It sucks that the new retina iPad Mini is severely supply-constrained, but given that it is constrained, the best way to put it on sale is quietly. They’re going to sell them as fast as they can make them for the foreseeable future, no use queueing people up to be disappointed.

★ Wednesday, 13 November 2013