Oooh, something shiny!2 min read

As part of the party we are co-hosting in Vegas, (see last post), we are giving away an Apple iPad 3G. The problem is the party is tonight and the iPad hasn’t been released yet! It is being released at 5pm today so I headed out to one of the three Apple stores here in Vegas today to “get in line, wait, and hope” to get two (one for the giveaway and one for me of course).

Apple is so weird. They limit you to only two and you must pay with a credit card. I know they haven’t been released anywhere else in the world yet so that must be what the credit card deal is all about (so Apple corporate can enforce the “limit 2” by ensuring some roague employee doesn’t sell them all to some cash wielding capitalist with an eBay account?). As always, they won’t tell you anything when you ask before they are released (or after for that matter). I called 4 stores in Georgia and Vegas to see if I could get any different answers but I think Apple’s CBO (chief brainwashing officer?) has done too good of a job mixing the Kool-Aid and getting everyone to drink. They all tell you that they don’t know how many their store has (is there a knome that delivers and guards them until someone comes to the back room to get one?), how long the lines will be, how fast they think they will sell based on past performance of the wifi version or iPhone releases, etc. I guess this creates more hype which I guess is the idea, but it is annoying!

So I got here at 2:30 and was #9 in line. Now at 4:45 there are right at 100 people in line. If I had a small collection of Star Trek memorabilia with me I could likely become wealthy.

T minus 10 minutes now. The world will be a better place, I promise. Think of all the features we will never use, and all the money Apple will make because they have released something else shiny.