So-called analysts love to muse about which gadgets will be popular at Christmas.

I am sure they use complicated models. I prefer to use a simpler one: theft.

Thursday night saw a grand heist from a San Carlos, Calif., Best Buy that suggests the iPad 2 will be in extreme demand over the next couple weeks.

In this particular incident, as chronicled by CBS San Francisco, thieves broke into Best Buy and took a whole steel rack of iPads containing at least 125 of the precious machines.

You might wonder how they did this.

Well, apparently they just walked straight in the front door. Specifically, police say they somehow got the door open, slid under a security roll-up door, and were in and out in less than a minute.

Yes, they were clever enough not to turn their faces toward the security cameras.

What is lovely is that, in the CBS report, local Best Buy shoppers had already determined that this must have been an inside job. However, it may have merely been a copy of another heist--again involving iPads--at a Best Buy in Brooklyn in October.

A couple of weeks ago, I mused that store security experts were claiming that filet mignon was still shoplifters' No. 1 Christmas target, with iPhones, iPads, and the like in fourth place.

I wondered then whether gadget theft would become so bad that they would have to be kept behind glass, as are razor blades in supermarkets.

Perhaps that's what will happen at Best Buy. Or perhaps the company will try to make its front doors a little harder to penetrate.