The iPad 2 - it's finally out but what about a price drop for the original?

So the big day has arrived for Apple to unveil the iPad 2 but as you may recall almost half a year ago we speculated that the price of the current generation would drop to $299 … Apple’s Steve Jobs made no official announcement of such a thing taking place, he simply stated that the new generation of their greatly successful device is getting many additions while maintaining the same price-points as the original iPad for the same 16, 32 and 64GB configurations.

So what about selling an original iPad cheaper? Turns out they are doing that in the refurbished section of their online store – by going there you can pick up a 16GB Wi-Fi version of the iPad for $349 which is just $50 more than the price we predicted it was likely to end up at.

We have no idea how long that deal will go on for, but if I had to guess, I’d say there are parts of the world where people will be excited to get their hands on any kind of iPad. But some gadget junkies will still want the latest and will gladly fork over the money for the iPad 2 with a dual-core processor, 2 cameras and HDMI out. For that matter, I know people will just buy the original iPad for family members who only wish to check their e-mail and do casual web browsing since it would eliminate a great deal of family member “tech support” calls. So we may not have gotten an official announcement from Apple, but today you can pick up an original 16GB iPad for $150 less than its initial $499 in Apple’s official online store.

Update: It looks like Apple dropped the price on the original (by $100 rather than $200 … for now) putting some more pressure on the competition so if you don’t care about the new iPad 2 but don’t want to “risk it” with a refurbished unit for $349 (or just happen to love the retail box of the retail unit), another $50 on top of the refurbished unit’s price gets you a brand new 16GB original iPad (at $399).