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All of you who have been waiting since March to buy an iPad 2 can now pull out your credit card and make your order. For the first time since the wildly successful tablet began shipping, supply is meeting demand, and shipping times are now under one week.
During the first month of sales, shipping times for the iPad 2 were often in the 4 to 5 week range. A quick tour of the major online Apple Stores for most of the countries in the world showed the same 3 to 5 day shipping times.
Improvements in prime contractor Foxconn's ability to build the difficult-to-make device are part of the reason, but Digitimes might have another answer. The electronics manufacturing website thinks that the long shipping times may have caused some would-be buyers to switch to other tablets, claiming in an article yesterday that the iPad 2's market share in Taiwan dropped to 50% due to supply shortages. That is, of course, just one small market -- and not a representative sampling of the worldwide market for tablets.
Foxconn now says that they'll be delivering between 14 to 15 million iPad 2 units to Apple over the next three months, which should make for easy availability both through Apple Stores and secondary channels.