The TouchPad Odyssey
From the day Steve Jobs showcased the iPad on stage in the Moscone Center I knew I wanted to own and use a tablet computer. I’d lie saying I had already seen the many uses of such device, but I did see that it would be huge and fun.
However, while I see the iPad as an extraordinary device and certainly well worth its price, I couldn’t justify spending the few hundred bucks to get one.
I couldn’t also get a cheap Android tablet as I have absolutely no faith in Google’s platform.
My plan was to wait until the iPad sported a retina display. I’d have the funds by then, I thought.
Last week, I changed my mind. In a theatrical twist, HP announced that it would stop selling PCs and webOS devices. Left with thousands and thousands of unsold TouchPads, HP decided to discount them, starting at $99.
By the time of the announcement, I didn’t put much thought into it: not living in the US, I figured we wouldn’t see discounted TouchPads hit Europe.
Last wednesday evening, Fnac1 announced on Twitter — and probably via other means too — that they would drop the TouchPad’s price the next day.
Following Steve Lyb’s train of thought, I figured a hundred bucks for a decent device is a good deal. I knew I wouldn’t hold onto it for long2, but it could serve as a reading device — e.g. Instapaper and Twitter.
It was available for order online at that time but I decided, for once, to get it in a store. “Surely, I thought, nobody would know about the price drop but geeks”. What a dumbfuck I’ve been…
So off I went the Thursday morning to the store. It usually opens at 10am but the bus schedule made me arrive at 10:10. Knowing the layout of the store, I went directly to the tablets section.
Quickly I realized there was a unusual amount of people waiting there for a Thursday morning. And it was only ten minutes past opening time!
As I crawled slowly towards the shelves, I overheard employees whispering about TouchPads. The manager told its subordinates there were no tablet left.
I sticked around to see what was really going on, and what I saw put me off.
Apparently, the employees put as many TouchPads away as they wanted to to benefit from the price drop. Right at opening time, some low-life whacko came and bought every TouchPads left. Neither the employees nor the manager restricted the purchase to one device per customer. So much for professionalism.
One female employee was being pushed hard by a forty-something woman to sell her reserved TouchPad at double the price. After hesitating a bit, she accepted, concluded the deal and was payed in cash for a device she hadn’t bought in the first place. Shocking.
To sum it up: too few devices and many already reserved to store employees; the remaining few were sold to one man; an employee was bribed in cash to sell a device she didn’t own.
Lesson learned: I’ll never try again to get something in store that I can order online. Greed and bribery are a plea to physical stores.
After that blatant failure I decided to repair my mistake and go check online. The search was in vain. The TouchPad was out of stock everywhere. All gone.
Then, on Twitter, an online discounter announced that it will hold a flash sale of 32 GB TouchPads with accessories. At the time, by the minute, they were all gone.
On Twitter again an online retailer said it’d have some stock later on and that it intended to hold a fair sale: one device per household to please as many as possible, and that everyone will be given enough time to prepare. No last-minute warning this time. Now that’s professionalism.
This is giving me time to ponder the pros and cons of getting a TouchPad and to read the conclusion of Steve Lyb’s “TouchPad Chronicles”. Moreover, I don’t know yet if I’ll be replacing my aging late-2008 unibody MacBook for a brand-new maxed-out MacBook Air this year. Getting a MBA and an iPad next year might be redundant.
Lastly, as I’ve said on Twitter, I’ve been using an iPad for the first time this weekend and I’m not sure I could stand a subpar device instead. I might end up getting a second-hand iPad 2.