Hewn from the trunk of — well — some sort of tree, then sanded down and oiled and hand rubbed and buffed with the bottom of a virgin angel, BlackBox sells these lovely sheathes for MacBooks of all variety for $129 a pop… except, alas, the MacBook Air, which could do with the reinforcement.
It is Cyber Monday, the online version of retailers’ Black Friday. To mark the event, Apple and others are marking down their products. First up is the mothership, which announced 30 percent off on select items purchased at the Apple Store. Next is ZAGG, which began a 50 percent off sale sitewide. Finally, the iPhone App Store has marked-down several applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch, including “Perfect Photo,” photo-editing software.
Along the way, we’ll also look at some hardware bargains ($885 for a MacBook Air, $200 for an iBook G4, $199 for a 32GB iPhone 4), as well as deals for your iPad and Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
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.
What will the CPU of your next MacBook look like? Well, it’ll almost definitely be one of Intel’s Sandy Bridge microprocessors, and if you want to see the future, you should peer into the entrails of the latest Windows notebooks.
We get in the Black Friday mood with a number of price cuts and freebies for the iPhone and iPad. First up is the Apple Store’s Black Friday event, with offers such as a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad for $458 – $41 off the usual price. We also have the Sketchbook Pro app for the iPad for just $0.99 – a $7 drop from Thursday. Finally is a new batch of iPhone app price cuts, including “Iron Man 2” for just $0.99 – a $4 reduction.
Along the way, we have price cuts on MacBook Airs and iMacs, as well as iPhone 4s. Plus there are cases, snap-on batteries and much more. As usual, details can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Apple notebooks continue to meteorically rise in popularity: according to component makers, Apple will soon be shipping over a million units per month, with MacBook Air orders already accounting for almost 25 percent of the volume.
Says Digitimes:
The sources cited IDC’s figures and pointed out that Apple’s combined shipments for the first three quarters of 2010 reached about 6.88 million units, and its global notebook market share rose from 3.7% in the first quarter to 5.2% in the third, while its market share in the US market surged from 6.7% to 12.6%.
The MacBook’s only going to get bigger from here.
[via 9to5Mac]
Looks like Apple will be offering offering about 10% off for Black Friday — if Apple Australia’s prices are anything to go by.
Apple has posted sale prices down under, offering 10-15% off many items, including iPad (A$50 off),, iMac and MacBook Pro (A$121 off) 13-inch MacBook Air (A$121.00 off), iPod nano (A$25 off).
The best deal looks like the iPod Touch at about 20% off (up to A$51). Also on sale are the Time Capsule, Magic Trackpad, and a range of iPad accessories. The same savings are likely to carry across to U.S. sales, which are one-day only.
Here’s details of Apple Australia’s other sale items:
In the spirit of the holiday, we here at Cult of Mac have decided to spend the day with our friends and families, but before we do, we thought we’d observe the holiday in the most Apple-centric way we know how… by each writing about the Apple product or related product that we’re most thankful for this year. You can find our choices after the jump, and we hope to hear your choices too.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Safari, Chrome and Firefox might be the most talked about browsers on OS X, but Opera’s still chugging along and pushing the envelope where it can in the ultra-competitive browser space, and the first beta for the Opera 11 version manages some tricks that even the big three haven’t managed yet.
Here’s video of Apple’s new AirPlay video streaming running on an AppleTV updated to iOS 4.1. The Apple TV is playing a Family Guy trailer streaming from a MacBook Air. Pretty cool. The big question about AirPlay is whether it will play video that hasn’t been obtained from iTunes. The Family Guy trailer was downloaded from the iTunes store. I’ll be testing non-iTunes video shortly.
