While you were either sleeping off the turkey or watching a game, some industrious Apple analysts were busy surveying the Black Friday landscape. The results: iPad sales were hotter than grandma’s pumpkin pie. After Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his team watched Apple retailers for seven hours he came away with this conclusion: the iPad is “the Mac of the masses.”
Strictly in terms of sales, 8.8 iPads were selling each hour, compared to 8.2 Macs, according to Munster. Despite comments like “the 11-inch MacBook Air has been flying off the shelves” from retailers, Mac sales were down compared to 2009, when Apple retailers sold 8.3 computers per hour for the day after Thanksgiving.
Of note, the iPad seems to be attracting computer buyers that Apple has not usually drawn into its stores. iPad sales may also have been helped by Apple’s Black Friday price cuts, lowering the online price of a 16GB Wi-Fi tablet to $458.
“The bottom line is that Apple’s addressable market is expanding with the iPad,” Munster wrote.
[Fortune]
