Apple killed it this Black Friday; tidal wave of sales hit Apple Retail Stores

12 years ago

“As retailers across the U.S. mopped the Black Friday blood and pepper spray from their floors, Apple walked away from the unofficial shopping holiday with bulging pockets,” Rachelle Dragani reports for MacNewsWorld. “It sold 68 percent more iPads than usual last Friday, beating sales forecasts by 7 p.m. that night.”

“On Black Friday, Apple lowered the iPad’s price by $40 and sold 70 percent more units than last year, according to information from Forbes,” Dragani reports. “‘At this point I think the biggest advantage is in the tablet space. I don’t see any strong competition there. Amazo has already had the Kindle Fire out, and the review seems to be that it’s good but not good enough,’ Hendi Susanto, analyst at Gabelli, told MacNewsWorld.”

Dragani reports, “Consumer preference research from Bernstein Research shows that buyers aren’t looking for tablets, they’re looking for iPads. ‘The iPad isn’t a compromise device. Something like the Fire is compromising. It’s small, it’s an e-reader, you can’t play games, you can’t connect to location-based services, really it provides one tenth of the functionality,’ Trip Chowdhry, senior analyst for Global Equities Research, told MacNewsWorld.”

“Considering its overall dominance in the market, combined with the expected arrival of the iPad 3 in the first half of next year, some research firms such as Jeffries predict iPad sales could nearly double in the fiscal year that started in September,” Dragani reports. “The firm estimated Apple could sell 65.4 million iPads, almost twice as many as the 32.4 million it sold in the 2011 fiscal year.”

Read more in the full article, including speculation about an Apple-branded re-imagining of the television set, here.