Author: Michael Evans
At the crack of dawn this morning our Athens hack, Kostas (see yesterday's post), was up and hotfooting it to his local branch of Plaisio in Vouliagmenis Avenue. He fully expected to find serried ranks of iPads in various capacities together with eye-watering direct-import prices. But we were both wrong.
All he discovered was a forlorn, totally neglected 16GB pad chained to a display board at the back of the store. "Oh no," pronounced the salesman, "this is just a display and we won't have iPads until the end of the summer." It was the dampest of damp squibs and demonstrates that iPad mania hasn't yet hit Greece. It took nearly two years before anyone was interested in the iPhone (largely because of the initial lack of a Greek keyboard) and, as I've said before on MacFilos, Greece isn't Apple's No.1 export market for Macs either. I suspect the iPad will also be a late starter.
As usual, we expected too much. Never knowingly undersold, the Greeks would not say "come and see" if they really meant "come and grab". If we'd thought things through, I wouldn't have sent our man over there before breakfast. At least it was an opportunity for a 10-minute play in peace. No one else was interested, after all.
All this is a pity, and it would have been interesting to note the level of inflation in the price. I'd even honed the headline for this piece: EXORBA THE GREEK. Sadly, it was not to be, but it is not to be resisted.