How I almost bought an iPad
Recently, I was in an Apple store in New York looking for the new, updated MacBook Pro units and toying with the idea of buying an iPad, when I was approached by one of Apple's friendly and knowledgeable sales people. She asked me whether I needed any help finding what I was looking for.
I really didn't--or at least I didn't think I did--but we started chatting anyway. I told her I'd heard the iPad could overheat in the sun and shut down. To my surprise, she responded that yes, it could, especially if you had it lying flat on your lap. But, she explained, it wasn't that big a deal, because it would just take a few minutes to cool down and then start up again.
The way she said it made it seem like it was an integrated feature to protect the device--not a downside. She talked about how the iPad didn't have a fan inside to cool it down like a laptop, which was why it shut down if it got too hot.
"Where'd you hear about it?" she asked.
"I read this article on the Internet," I said, then quickly changed the subject, afraid she might have actually read the article and somehow associated it with me. "Has anybody returned an iPad because it was overheating?"
"No, I haven't had to process a return for that."
"What about a cracked screen?"
Nope. No one she'd seen had come in yet with a cracked screen. She thought that was because people were treating them like laptops, rather than phones. They were more careful with them.
"So, why do people return them?" I asked. "You have 15 days to return it, right?"
"Well, people really only seem to be returning them because they decide they want the 3G version, which comes out at the end of this month. We get some of those." … Read more
