Apple iPad Available for Pre-Order. You Getting One?

Apple’s iPad has been available for pre-order since 8:30am Friday morning. They took down their site temporarily in order to update and prepare. Not sure why a company like Apple can’t just update the site without taking the whole thing down. I assume it’s some type of marketing tactic as they do this all the time. The blogosphere was abuzz with the news that they’d taken down the site this morning and posts have been going up all day about the iPad, so I guess their plan works.

You can pre-order your iPad at 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB. They will run you $499, $599, and $699 respectively. This is for the simple Wi-Fi version. If you want to kick things up a notch and add 3G support, you’re looking at $629, $729, and $829 for the same sizes. There is a limit of 2 per customer and your Wi-Fi versions will ship on April 3rd.

If you do opt for the 3G version, you also need a data plan through AT&T. That’s going to cost you $14.99/month for 250MB of data, or $29.99 for unlimited access. Personally, these things look so frail that I would be afraid to carry it to the bathroom, much less outside of the house. This is where accessories come in.

The iPad Case ($39.99) is supposed to protect the iPad and you still have full access to the device with it on. It looks like a simple binder-type deal, though. Not sure how much protection that offers. The other interesting accessory is the iPad Keyboard Dock ($69.99), which basically turns your iPad into an oddly-shaped laptop that still needs to be synced with a full-fledged computer. It also allows easy connections to your multimedia equipment and computer.

With all the hype surrounding the iPad, I’m sure they’re selling off at a pretty good clip. Some speculate that Apple could be making as much as $10 million per hour based on a theory by one customer.

We just bought two iPads, about 30 minutes apart. Our order IDs are 10,000 apart. Assuming those order IDs are sequential, and they appear to be, then Apple is selling 20,000 iPads per hour. Assuming most orders are for the $499 model, and that people are only buying 1 per order, that means Apple is selling $10MM/hour. Of course that is not sustainable, but if they did it for a year, it would be $87.6B. (via SAA)

Whatever the case may be, the question still remains. Are you getting an iPad? How will you use it, exactly?