If you look at buying a non-used car, you might get a wide choice of colours in the brochure, but in all honestly, how many garages will sell you the exact colo

If you look at buying a non-used car, you might get a wide choice of colours in the brochure, but in all honestly, how many garages will sell you the exact colour you want (with the spec you want) there & then? People I know who have tried this, generally wait around two weeks or more from order to delivery, or settle for a slightly different spec. I don't see how you can easily scale consumer electronics manufacturing to allow for a range of different colours (certainly not in the case of the iPad anyway), one key factor being that I don't think you can predict demand of individual colours reliably enough. Then you have the issue of handling returns etc. People would get annoyed walking into an Apple store to swap a broken device, only to be told they've run out of that colour/spec combination. They can probably get away with it on the nano due to small product size, low manufacturing cost and limited spec difference (2 base models). If they made the iPad in five colours, you've suddenly upped the variation from 6 models to 30. That's a big leap and a big complication to many otherwise simpler business processes. My TV comes in one colour, my toaster two, my SLR one, my printer one, heck even mass market clothing/fashion items rarely come in more than a couple of base colours these days. The majority of consumers are not bothered by purchasing something in a generic colour if the product is good enough, companies want to sell to this majority (not the minority of people that refuse to purchase something based on colour) to maximize profit.