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iCade arcade cabinet for iPad starts selling at $100, already on backorder
Humans, they just love mixing the old with the new. To wit, the iCade gaming cabinet for the iPad, an April Fools' joke that was just a fun idea this time last year, has gone and turned very real, replete with FCC certification and now a pre-order page. The Bluetooth-communicating iPad enclosure seems to have originally been on sale for immediate delivery, but ThinkGeek has burned through its first shipment of units faster than you can say "Atari's Greatest Hits." The second batch of $100 iCades is expected by May 20th at the very latest, although orders are being taken only from the US for now. The rest of the world needn't despair, however -- we hear building one of your own is a pleasurable and rewarding experience.
Seven months later, the Nikon D3s is still a unicorn
B&H, J&R, Adorama, Amazon, the list goes on -- we dare you to find a US model Nikon D3s for sale anywhere among them (spoiler: you can't). What's remarkable about it is that the mighty 12.1 megapixel beast has technically been on sale since late November of last year, and yet some seven months later, many top-tier photography retailers still list the camera as a pre-order or "coming soon" as though it's never even hit retail to begin with. Well, it has -- sort of -- but it's been available in such ridiculously small quantities that your best bet has been to score a gray market unit off eBay (often at a price above the US MSRP of $5,199) that lacks a manufacturer warranty. On a precision machine this expensive and complex, that's not a very wise thing to wave off. It's not at all unusual for new flagship DSLRs from Nikon and Canon to be backordered to the extreme (in fact, it's the norm), but the D3s' situation is pretty unprecedented -- and there's no letup in sight. We spoke to J&R this past weekend about the tight inventory and we were told that they receive maybe "one or two" D3s bodies every couple of weeks, but not on a regular schedule; they just get them when they get them, and naturally, they're sold out by the time the boxes roll into the store. Folks browsing J&R's website don't even stand a chance. So, what's the story? Is there a manufacturing problem that Nikon is trying to correct? Is the camera's full-frame sensor being produced at insanely low yields? It'd one thing for demand to outstrip supply, but in this case, they're not even in the same league. It seems like there could be something afoot here, but a company spokesperson has told us this week that there's nothing more to blame than extraordinary demand, seeing how a single factory produces units for the entire world. Fair enough, Nikon -- but considering the rate at which DSLRs obsolesce, it's totally reasonable to think we'll see a D4 before supply catches up.
