With consumer buying in the tank and computer makers reportedly readying $299 holiday PCs, can 
Apple afford to repeat its usual $100 discounts on Macs? One analyst thinks its time for Steve Jobs to get ‘aggressive’ during the all-important ‘Black Friday’ after-Thanksgiving sales.
Barclay Capital’s Ben Reitzes told investors Wednesday Apple should offer discounts on iPhones and iPods, as well as Macs.
“We would like to see Apple get more price aggressive in every product, including the iPhone, given obvious weakness in the economy,” he wrote in a note to investors.
Apple can afford expanding its limited discounts. “The company’s high margins could likely absorb” the offers. AT&T could duplicate Orange’s expected holiday price cut to 99 euros.
Another possibility: consumers could turn to the iPod when searching for an affordable gadget. Along with carrying the well-known Apple brand, sales of iPods are surprising analysts as sales drop less than half of that expected.
However, don’t expect this holiday to see Apple offering an inexpensive netbook, an area Reitzes predicts will show the greatest demand. Despite consumers searching for low-cost electronics, Cupertino won’t unveil a netbook “for several more quarters.”
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
