HP gave shoppers one more chance to pick up TouchPad tablets at fire sale prices this weekend when the company offered refurbished tablets through its eBay store. 16GB TouchPads were priced at $99 each, while 32GB models ran $149.
But a few seconds after the tablets went on sale at 6:00PM Central Time on Sunday, December 11th, shoppers started to experience problems. The website was sluggish, people had problems logging in and checking out.
A number of people reported that they added a tablet to their cart, but by the time they got to the checkout screen there was a message saying the TouchPad was no longer available.
After an hour or two it appears all of the available tablets were sold out. It probably would have happened sooner if the website had behaved properly.
So how many TouchPads did HP sell? According to the eBay sales stats for each model, a little under 8,000. Most of those tablets were 32GB models, while about 2,300 16GB tablets were sold.
Update: Actually it looks like closer to 10,000 tablets were sold in a total of 4 different auctions.
There are still plenty of places to pick up used, or even new-in-box TouchPads. But it’s not often that you can get one for as little as $99. They tend to sell for between $200 and $300 on eBay and Amazon
The HP TouchPad features a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core processor, and webOS 3.0 operating system. It was launched this summer with prices starting at $499, but HP responded to sluggish sales by canceling the product less than two months later and slashing prices.
At that point, the TouchPad became a hot seller. It turns out it’s a lot easier to get excited about buying a $99 tablet at 80% off its list price than about paying iPad-like prices for a tablet that’s not an iPad.
Owners have also done a number of interesting things with their TouchPads, including overclocking the tablet or installing Ubuntu or Android.
HP recently announced that the webOS software used for the TouchPad will become open source, and the company may release new webOS tablets in 2012 or 2013.
via SlashGear
I had the same thing happen to me, it was in my cart and got kicked out of paypal and lost it!
Not that it really matters much, but the actual number sold was more like 10,500. Â I suspect your lower number was based on seeing only 3 of the 4 auctions HP had running.
Strangely enough, only 3 of the 4 showed up in the Completed Auctions list, and I wouldn’t have been able to check the 4th if I didn’t already have it in my Watch List.
Thanks for correcting the totals, Brad. Â
Just in case anyone ever challenges you on that, here are the actual counts, direct from eBay (I managed to find the missing auction in my browser cache, that didn’t show up in Completed):
16g: 170746761917 — 2,316 sold
32g: 170746761866 — 2,763 sold
32g: 170746761857 — 2,771 sold
32g: 170746761819 — 2,771 sold
10,621 total
(The second part of your strikeout was actually correct.)
I tried as well; not luck, I would have thought they would have had more than just 8000, especially only having about 2000 16GB.
I tried — gave up after 30 minutes and multiple attempts to get beyond clicking the “Buy with Paypal” screen. The servers were clearly being hammered and no doubt it was a complete lottery as to who ended up with anything.
It’s amazing that after so many years nobody’s managed to figure out a way to deal with high-demand things like this — it was the same with London 2012 tickets too.
It was figured out a long time ago — think about high volume sites like the Google homepage. Â But it’s costly.