No iPad for You

Many early adopters of the iPad are probably familiar with Apple’s rule that limits the number of iPads a customer can purchase to two units.  What most probably aren’t aware of is that there is apparently a lifetime limit to the number of iPads a consumer can purchase.  One blogger found this out the hard way, describing his experience in his blog titled Protocol Snow.

As a favor to the overseas members of the NeoGAF gaming forum, he offered to buy and ship iPads to them since Apple delayed the international release date.  He made multiple trips to his local Apple Store, never purchasing more than two iPads at a time.  After the store ran out of stock, he made a reservation to fulfill one last order he had.  However when he went to pick it up, he found he was not allowed to purchase it.

He was told he had “reached his lifetime limit of iPad purchases” and would not be allowed to purchase any more.  Incredulously, he grilled the employee but was told no more information.  He was not told what the limit was, whether or not someone else could buy it for him, nothing.  Only that he was not allowed to buy an iPad.

So there you have it.  There is a limit to the number of iPads a single customer can buy in his or her lifetime.  No word on it it’s tracked by credit card or iTunes Store account.  We only know that it exists and you can get banned from buying iPads.  Unfortunately, we don’t even know that that limit is.  It’s possible Apple intended to limit iPad purchases to two per customer for life and simply made a mistake with this guy.  He was only caught after he made a reservation for an iPad with his iTunes account when stock was low.

What will be interesting to see is if this is just a temporary measure taken to protect availability so every customer can get one while the product is new or if Apple really means to maintain this lifetime limit.  Hopefully, as the iPad releases internationally and becomes old news, this will become irrelevant and the rule will simply go away but until we know more you should be aware that you might just get banned on an iPad spree.

Let us know how you feel about a lifetime limit on iPad in our comments below.