Piper Jaffray: iPad 2 totally sold out, 70% to new buyers
By Sunday, Gene Munster's team couldn't find an Apple tablet for sale at any retail outlet — Apple Fifth Avenue Store Friday afternoon. Photo: PED — Gene Munster's team at Piper Jaffray walked the iPad 2 lines in New York City …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gene Munster's team at Piper Jaffrey found no iPad 2 available at any retail outlet days after launch, and their line surveys in New York City put 70% of buyers as new customers — echoing the original iPad's debut, when stores were already selling out by May 2010. The pattern repeating across two launches suggests sell-through is outpacing whatever supply Apple has committed to.
The 70% new-buyer figure is the analytically important part: a sell-out driven by upgrades would say one thing about the installed base, but a majority-new customer base says the tablet category is still expanding rather than cycling.
First-order effects
- Apple is leaving immediate revenue uncaptured while every retail channel, including its Fifth Avenue flagship store, sits empty of inventory — the constraint is on units shipped, not demand.
- The 70%-new-customer survey gives Apple evidence that the iPad 2 is pulling first-time tablet buyers, not just trading up 2010's early adopters.
Second-order effects
- Persistent scarcity creates an arbitrage layer around the product: buyers unable to find units at list price become customers for whoever can source stock, pressuring Apple to either ramp production or watch gray-market pricing form above MSRP.
- Rival tablet makers watching the same channel checks now have confirmation that mainstream consumer demand exists at scale, raising the stakes on their own pricing and availability decisions.
Third-order effects
- If launch-week sell-outs become the norm across successive iPad generations, analyst channel checks like Munster's harden into a standing methodology for measuring Apple demand, and 'sold out' shifts from a supply problem to a marketed signal of momentum.
- A repeat of this pattern would push Apple toward structurally larger initial build commitments each cycle, making supplier component orders a leading indicator of how Apple itself reads tablet demand.
The trend: Annual iPad launches are establishing launch-week scarcity as both a recurring supply challenge for Apple and a de facto demand metric that Wall Street tracks through retail channel checks.