Apple

Apple may have sold anywhere from 400,000 to 500,000 units of the iPad 2 during the tablet's launch weekend, exceeding the company's expectations, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Those numbers compared with 300,000 of the original iPad sold during its debut weekend last April.

But the new numbers are even stronger when viewed as a one-day sales total.

Many retailers ran out of stock by late Friday, only hours after the iPad 2 launched, and were unable to replenish those supplies over the weekend, said Munster in a research note released Sunday night … Read more

Goldilocks Episode 9 was edited on and uploaded from an iPad 2.

I first ran into Anna Elizabeth James and Michael Koerbel, the aspiring movie-industry duo of Majek Pictures, through the short film "Apple of My Eye" recorded and edited last year entirely on an iPhone 4.

Since last June, the team has been busy. They've since produced eight installments of similarly produced action series called Goldilocks and an app that lets people download new episodes. And starting Friday, they upgraded their editing studio: two iPad 2s running Apple's new tablet version of iMovie were used to produce Goldilocks episode nine.

"The iPad 2 is definitely more fun than editing on an iPhone," James told CNET in an e-mail. Regarding iMovie, "the feature requests we posed to Apple were pretty much all addressed in this version."

Apple's product demonstrations are designed to elevate people's expectations and aspirations, but don't expect average Apple product owners to be able to reproduce what Majek Pictures did easily. But do take it as evidence that the "post-PC era," no matter how much I don't care for that particular term, will extend well beyond playing Angry Birds and posting updates on Facebook. … Read more

Part of the tradition of an Apple product release is the teardown.

Usually within hours of the first sales, pictures begin to emerge from the odd people who delight in taking the new gadgets apart to see what's going on inside. The days following Friday's release of the iPad 2 have been no different. I've seen two different teardowns already.

But the teardown that Wall Street and the investment community is waiting on is the one from the market research firm IHS iSuppli, whose team spent all day Saturday in a furious effort to dissemble a 32-gigabyte … Read more

I know that patience isn't everybody's thing. Friday, I wandered along early in the (my) morning to see how many people were lined up at the Apple store in Corte Madera, Calif.

It was the most civilized line I have ever seen, not unlike the one you'd see at Starbucks every morning. It was populated by those who might be described as being past the middle of their lives.

And yet, it seems, there was still no guarantee that these very nice people would actually get the iPad 2 that they were queuing for.

A report in 9to5Mac, … Read more

While some iPad 2 buyers have been surprised to see their online orders ship early, new buyers are seeing wait times for new orders extended yet again.

Apple today quietly pushed the ship times for iPad 2 online orders back once again, now estimating new purchases at 3 weeks to a month.

The new shipping times, along with sellouts, and limited model availability at retail stores (including its own), are a clear sign that Apple is having a tough time meeting demand. A similar situation took place during the first launch, leading to Apple pushing back its international launch, which … Read more

Wondering what makes that iPad 2 you just got tick and how much faster it is than the original iPad? Anandtech, iFixit, iosnoops, and UBM TechInsights have provided some answers.

Processor performance: Let's address this first--for obvious reasons. Apple has already been very public about the dual-core 1GHz A5 processor--a step up from the single-core chip in the original iPad--and the chip's "up to 9X faster" graphics" (Apple's ad copy).

And the verdict from an independent review? "CPU [Central Processing Unit] performance...we found to be a healthy 50 percent faster than the … Read more

In what may have been nothing more than a minor footnote to Friday's launch of Apple's iPad 2, shipping times on Apple's Web site quickly jumped from 3 to 5 business days to 2 to 3 weeks.

Interestingly, according to a report from AppleInsider, AT&T is already shipping iPad 2s to customers, with some expecting to see theirs as early as Monday.

As of the writing of this article, shipping times on Apple's Web site are 3 to 4 weeks for all models of the iPad 2. The photo below, from AppleInsider, shows the … Read more

Second-generation products tend to have most of the kinks worked out, though for some, the iPad 2 is exhibiting issues with the screen that have appeared in past Apple products.

One of those issues is light leaking from around the bezel into the display. A handful of threads on Apple's support forums (1,2), as well as a poll of users on Engadget, have called it out, with some taking photos that show light spreading out from one or more of the iPad 2's four screen edges. These leaks do not appear as focused light, but rather a … Read more

If there were any lingering doubts that Apple's iPad sequel would draw the same interest the first-generation device did, they were quashed before stores even opened their doors yesterday.

The iPad 2, a device that was unveiled just 10 days ago, launched to huge crowds and inventory that sold out quickly, both in stores and online.

Shipping times for online orders, which opened yesterday morning at 1 a.m. PT--some 16 hours before the first Apple retail stores began selling the iPad 2--were quickly pushed from days into weeks. This left the best chance for customers who wanted to … Read more