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The Apple iPad 2 has hit eBay UK and is already demanding silly money. The new iPad hit US shops on Friday, with profit-minded moneygrubbers and early adopters looking to cash in and show off.
The highest we’ve seen comes from some muppet in Chicago who we won’t
dignify with the publicity, offering his 16GB model for £124,000. Surely no-one would pay that kind of money, even if the iPad 2 has sold out in a number of stores — perhaps this is a new form of early adopter showing-off.
Why fondle your new gadget in front of a couple of people in the pub, on the bus or at work, when you can show it off to the whole world? Early adopting show-offs have to think big!
One outlandish auction is a 64GB 3G model for which the owner wants a whopping £6,244, but as far as we can see that’s a deliberate ploy to get a link to the seller’s store at the top of the list. Resellers are also flogging job lots of up to 10 tablets for more than £3,000.
Other eBayers haven’t even got their hands on the iPad 2 yet, making things even more complicated. Instead they’re offering pre-orders, including UK sellers promising to sell you one when they go on sale over here on 25 March.
If you are determined to buy it now, remember to check the small print. Chicanery includes auctions that are telling you where to get an iPad 2, or selling covers and other accessories without making it immediately clear what you’re buying. Check your seller has a decent rating and plenty of positive feedback. Remember not to get a 3G model from the US, as it will be locked to Yank networks AT&T or Verizon and won’t work over here. And good luck!
Less financially minded iPad 2 owners include the good folks at iFixit, who tore their box-fresh new tablet apart to discover a bigger battery, 512MB of RAM and a ninja-grade GPU. Meanwhile, hacker Comex appears to have jailbroken the iPad 2, and is working on a public version of the hack. Heck, we wonder if anyone is buying an iPad 2 just to take it home and use it.
If you do eBay an iPad, let us know how you get on. Whether or not you’re tempted, how much is it worth to you to be the coolest kid on the block by getting your gizmo first? If you saw someone produce an iPad 2 from their bag in the next fortnight, would you drool all over them like the early adopting gadget guru they are, or facepalm in frustration at the fortune this buffoon must have forked out? Shout out in the comments or on our Facebook wall.
