Assorted Udderances take a pull offa Ben's pipe

My iPad delivery is late

I pre-ordered an iPad a few weeks ago, and delivery was promised by today coincident with the international launch. I received a shipment notification at the start of the week, and everything looked on track until yesterday when I received an e-mail from Apple stating that "FedEx has informed us that, due to a flight delay, your package will not deliver on May 28th as planned" and will instead arrive, perhaps, on Saturday.

In and of itself this is not really a big deal, and it doesn't make much of a difference to me. However, it rankles for two reasons:

• FedEx's own status page, for a full day following this message from Apple, was still advising on-time delivery for May 28 at 12:00 noon. It also detailed a non-sensical and discontiguous itinerary of departures and arrivals between Anchorage, Memphis, and now Mississauga.
• Since today is significant only as a marketing date and the shipments were ostensibly ready to go well before this time, Apple could have erred on the side of customer satisfaction and shipped a few days early.

It seems unusual for Apple to over-promise and under-deliver, although its neurosis of trying to orchestrate a precise and coordinated world-wide reveal is unsurprising.