Edible Apple

Wow, what an admittedly lame headline, but what can ya do, it’s Friday.

BoyGeniusReport chimes in with a pair of reports that make the phrase “shortage of Palm Pre’s” seem like a gross understatement.

We’ve been told that there are only roughly 4,250 Palm Pres that Best Buy stores will be receiving for launch day on June 6th. Scott Anderson of Best Buy Mobile told us there were around 1,000 Best Buy locations that would be selling the Pre, so this leaves us with around 4 units per store. For launch. Incredible, isn’t it?

The report goes on to say that while the Pre will also be available at various Radio Shack stores, each store will only be equipped with 2, that’s right 2!, Pre’s come launch day.

But wait, there’s more.

In another entry, BoyGeniusReport notes:

In fact, thanks to one of our ninjas we now know that Best Buy Mobile’s own Pre launch guide lays out a two-pronged launch: Phase 1 will be from June to July where inventory will be extremely low and marketing will be minimal. Best Buy Mobile is warning stores that “customer demand will outweigh inventory and stores may go weeks after launch with little or no replenishment.”

… Due to the low expected inventory, only 300 specially selected stores will have working demos of the Pre. The remainder of the stores will sell their entire inventory of the Pre and will not have a live phone on display.

I’m not sure what the deal is here.  Maybe Palm doesn’t want to overextend itself, but this almost seems like its shooting itself in the foot.  Is there a holdup in production, or what?  The Palm Pre needs to come out guns a blazin’, and having interested customers wait a few weeks isn’t a luxury Palm can afford to take.

Any theories as to what’s going on?