iPad 4 Begins to Sell Out

With just a couple days before the fourth-generation iPad is scheduled to ship, Apple.com AAPL shows that the initial allotments have already sold out. In the United States, customers can expect the device to arrive within a week. According to The Inquirer, British customers are experiencing the same wait times. This is a bit faster than the iPad Mini, which will not ship for two weeks. Daring customers can still get up early this Friday, November 2 and wait in line with the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of other iDevice enthusiasts who plan to storm Apple's retail stores. Regardless of the size of the line, it should not be difficult to track down the new iPad this weekend. When the third-generation iPad was released in March, Apple had more than enough units for the smaller-than-expected crowd. In fact, Apple had stacks of units, indicating that either demand had declined or that the company had finally solved its supply chain problems (the iPad 2 was much harder to come by). While consumers had high hopes for the iPad Mini, demand for the actual product has not been particularly high. The two-week shipping rate may be intriguing, but that delay could have been caused after selling a very small number of units. Apple is quick to brag when it sells millions of iDevices, but the company has never said how many units it sells through each individual channel. Thus, Apple.com may have only had 10,000 or 20,000 units available, not the hundreds of thousands of units that are thought to have already been sold. Follow me @LouisBedigianBZ