With the iPad3 expected to be announced on 7 March, eBay is preparing for a flood of bargain iPad and iPad 2s to be listed for sale.
Knocked down iPad 2 devices, the second generation iPad, and even cheaper first generation iPads will be up for grabs by savvy shoppers.
A new, un-used, 32gb first generation iPad can be bought for £330 on eBay.co.uk. They're not dodgy sellers who will peddle you a wooden replica, eBay has plenty of reputable professional sellers.
Ahead of the hotly anticipated Apple launch, eBay.co.uk said that tablet and eReader sales are surging on the site, increasing fourfold (443%) in the last year. More than 61,000 tablets were sold in December 2011 alone.
Tablets walloped desktop PCs, sales of which fell by 35% over the same period.
iPad buyers love an eBay bargain as much as they love new gadgets, it seems.
Immediately following the launch of the iPad 2 in February/March 2011, tablet sales on eBay UK spiked. 5,000 more devices sold in March than the previous month as tech freaks sought to upgrade.
The same thing happened when the new Amazon Kindle went on sale in time for Christmas 2011. Over 22,000 more devices were sold in October and November last year, than the previous month.
Angus McCarey, UK Retail Director for eBay, said: "Millions of people use the eBay iPad app, and we find the busiest time for shopping via the iPad to be between 5 and 11pm. Our research shows that shoppers tend to spend almost twice as long shopping via their iPad compared to a typical browsing session on your smartphone."
Internet security firm Symantec found that employees report more breakages or "lost" iPads and tablets when upgraded devices are released.
Greg Day, EMEA Security CTO for Symantec, writes in his blog: "When I spoke to a group of CSOs recently they mentioned the correlation they are seeing between a new version of a device being released and lost and broken devices being reported to the business (i.e. the user is looking for the upgrade)."
The information came out of their investigations into how firms manage the new "bring your own device" office culture, where companies often don't keep up with the latest software and hardware upgrade.