iPads are taking forever to ship — here’s why

iPads are taking forever to ship — hither's why

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Order ane of the best iPads from Apple tree these days, and you lot're in for a long wait before your new tablet arrives. And Apple'south iPhone could exist partly to blame.

A report in Nikkei Asia says that some buyers are having to look equally long equally 9 weeks to get their easily on an iPad — a upshot of supply constraints and component shortages that all of the tech industry is dealing with. Only the report suggests that Apple's push to shorten look times on iPhone orders is contributing to the iPad delays.

Announcing Apple tree's tape holiday earnings a week ago, CEO Tim Cook downplayed the connection betwixt iPhone and iPad transport times. "If y'all await at the commonality between different products, there is some, just mostly the challenge is on legacy nodes, and these legacy nodes are past supplier," Melt told Wall Street analysts during a briefing on Apple tree'south quarterly functioning. "And so information technology'southward much more focused on the supplier than annihilation else."

But Nikkei Asia claims that when supply chains began improving last December, Apple tree told its manufacturing partners to ramp upward iPhone assembly. The idea, the report claims, was that Apple wanted more phones on manus to meet demand for the holiday season and prior to Lunar New Year celebrations in Asia.

The consequence is that iPhone wait times take dropped, while iPad shoppers are all the same spending a lot of time twiddling their thumbs between ordering a tablet and having it arrive. Specifically, the Nikkei report says, there's an average wait of well-nigh l days for anyone ordering a 64GB iPad from Apple. If that seems like a long delay, it's amend than the 55-day wait customers were facing 2 months ago.

For the sake of comparison, iPhone wait times are downwardly to 10 days lately after being as long as a month at the cease of 2021.

	Configuration/Color	Delivery time	In-store pickup
iPad Pro, eleven-inch	128GB/Infinite greyness	2 weeks	Today
iPad Pro, 12.9-inch	128GB/Space gray	1 week	Today
iPad Air	64GB/Space grayness	i-2 weeks	Today
iPad	64GB/Space gray	one month	Non available
iPad mini	64GB/Space grey	i month	Not available
iPhone 13	128GB/Blue	Tomorrow	Today
iPhone 13 mini	128GB/Blue	Tomorrow	Today
iPhone xiii Pro	128GB/Sierra Blue	Tomorrow	Today
iPhone 13 Pro Max	128GB/Sierra Blueish	Tomorrow	Today

Our own quick research bears out the report's findings. Checking iPad inventories from the Bay Area, but the 12.nine-inch iPad Pro had a shipping fourth dimension of a calendar week or sooner among the base of operations model tablets that Apple sells. Both the eleven-inch iPad Pro and iPad Air faced waits of several weeks, while it would take a month for the iPad mini and regular iPad to ship to u.s.. All iPhone 13 models are shipping right away — a big improvement from the delays of a calendar week or 2 that we saw in Dec.

Delayed iPad shipments are being felt by Apple. During the company's vacation quarter, the iPad was the only segment of Apple's business to not tape whatsoever sales growth, falling 14% from the year-ago menses. Over that same time, iPhone sales rose nine% to a record $71.vi billion for the quarter.

If there'due south good news here for impatient iPad shoppers, its that Apple tree sees the supply concatenation state of affairs improving even if issues aren't going to disappear whatever time before long. "Overall we practice see an improvement in the March quarter in terms of the constraints going down versus what they were in the Dec quarter," Melt said.

Should you detect yourself in the market for an iPad, you've got two choices and so — yous could delay your purchase while waiting for Apple to become its hands on more parts and ramp up product. Simply if you know yous'll need an iPad sooner rather than later on, it may be best only to place your order now and resign yourself to the fact that you're in for a longer-than-usual wait.

Philip Michaels is a senior editor at Tom's Guide. He has strong opinions virtually Apple, the Oakland Athletics and one-time movies. Follow him at @PhilipMichaels.