Apple Stores will get iPads on March 10th, customers on the 26th?
The Examiner has a pretty interesting iPad story for us today. According to their sources, the iPad will reach Apple Stores for employee training on March 10th. On March 15th, the television commercials (remember the one filmed in a diner in California?) will air.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report from the Examiner lands two weeks after the earlier rumor that Apple would open iPad presales in late February, and it sketches what the next phase of the launch looks like: hardware physically arriving at Apple Stores for staff training on March 10th, television commercials — including one filmed at a California diner — starting March 15th, and a possible customer-facing sale on March 26th.
Every element of the timeline carries a rumored status, so the value here is less in the specific dates than in the shape they imply: Apple appears to be sequencing presale interest into in-store readiness, using its own retail chain as both training ground and launch venue.
First-order effects
- If the March 10th delivery holds, Apple Store employees get hands-on iPad units more than two weeks before any customer purchase, making staff fluency the gating factor for the retail launch.
- The reported March 15th commercial start would mark the shift from Steve Jobs' January unveiling to paid mass-market advertising aimed at general consumers rather than the early-adopter audience.
Second-order effects
- A confirmed in-store date would force resolution of the presale question raised in February — whether online orders ship ahead of, or alongside, store stock — shaping where launch-day demand actually lands.
- Third-party accessory makers and carriers watching the timeline gain a fixed window to time their own case, dock, and connectivity announcements to the same launch moment.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — train staff on real hardware weeks out, advertise mid-cycle, sell only when retail is ready — points to Apple treating its stores as launch infrastructure rather than mere points of sale, a template other consumer-electronics makers would need their own owned-retail equivalents to match.
The trend: Apple is institutionalizing a controlled retail-launch cadence for new device categories, with its own stores absorbing the training and staging burden that traditional carrier-led rollouts once handled.