Edible Apple

Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year and Apple was an active participant with attractive deals across its entire product line, save for the iPhone of course.

And so the start of the busiest holiday shopping period began with a bang for Apple who, according to Seth Weintraub of 9to5Mac, recorded its biggest sales day in retail history. Whereas initial Apple forecasts anticipated sales to come in at 4x normal volume, actual sales this past Friday “blew away” those forecasts by 7PM.

Citing a source from within Apple Retail, 9to5Mac relays:

Apple Retail was forecast and broke Retail sales records all over the country today, this is from [redacted] today, the forecast today is more than 4 times what we normally do. We broke the forecast by 7pm.

Adding his two-cents to the discussion, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a research note to investors this morning that Apple this past Friday sold approximately 15 iPads per hour, representing a 68% increase from Black Friday last year. With respect to Macs, Apple Stores sold about 10 an hour, representing a 25% increase from last year.

Consequently, Munster anticipates that Apple will sell upwards of 13.5 million iPads during the holiday quarter.

Apple, of course, wasn’t the only company to delight in Black Friday sales. Amazon, though curiously still shy about releasing specific Kindle sales figures, did note that it sold four times as many Kindles this year as it did last year. This was to be expected for a few reasons. First and foremost, there are new a few Kindle models out on the market now – the basic e-reader, a $99 touchscreen Kindle, and of course, the $199 Kindle Fire tablet which sells for $199.

The Kindle Fire is positioned to take on the iPad, and despite debuting to horrid reviews, its prime placement on the Amazon homepage, we think, ensures that people will be snatching them up in bulk. Whether or not the Kindle Fire has any staying power, however, is another discussion entirely.