Apple Crushes Black Friday Sales Expectations

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Much to the surprise of no one, Apple beat market expectations for Black Friday sales, outpacing a typical Friday by more than four times.  These figures, according to website 9 To 5 Mac, were taken from a screenshot of Apple's retail inventory system, and are not official.  Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster also believes these projections as he has anecdotal evidence that he and his team collected by physically standing in an Apple Store and tallying up sales.  According to his estimates, Apple sold approximately 10.1 Macs per hour, and 14.8 iPads per hour, which translates into a 28% increase in Mac sales year over year, and a 68% increase in iPad sales over last year.

All of this is only speculation however, as Apple does not report sales figures until the current fiscal quarter has ended.  However, the website ComScore.com is reporting that total online Black Friday spending totaled $816 Million this year; a 26% increase from a year ago.  ComScore.com is also reporting that Apple was the fifth most visited website on Black Friday, behind Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and Target.

As a whole, it's been widely reported that Black Friday sales were up across the board, with Amazon stating that they sold four times more Kindles than last year's Black Friday, without actually divulging any numbers.  It will be interesting to see how many Kindles have been sold since the Kindle Fire was released, and how those sales stack up against the iPad.

Apple's North Carolina iCloud Facility Not Generating Jobs

Photo Credit:  The Washington Post

Maiden is a small town in North Carolina, known mainly for its furniture production before the recession hit in 2008.  After falling on hard times, locals looked forward to Apple building a $1 Billion data center just outside of town, with the hope that the facility would help employ local residents, and possibly put a dent in the 10.5% unemployment rate which has stifled the region.  Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

The Washington Post is reporting that the huge new iCloud data center Apple built employs only 50 people full-time.  The heavy lifting that would have been done by hundreds or possibly thousands of people in the past, are now done by hundreds or thousands of servers, running software written mostly in Silicon Valley.  

Local authorities hope that Apple's presence will increase the local tax-base, and therefore allow the town to lower taxes for residents.  People remain skeptical however, as they were hoping for a more direct injection into the local economy in the form of jobs.

This scenario is not unique to Apple, as Google has also opened a data center in North Carolina, while Facebook has recently begun construction of a new data center to complement its not-yet-completed facility in Rutherford County, North Carolina.  Google's $600 Million facility employs over 100 people, and Facebook has announced that only 30 people have been hired full-time at their Rutherford facility.  This is probably not what North Carolina residents had in mind when these projects were announced.

So is building these facilities a boon for local economies, or just a psychological boost for a region mired in unemployment?  So far, it looks like the only people benefitting are North Carolina politicians and California corporations.  We'll keep you posted as the new data centers come online, and more employment figures becomes available.  

Dell and HP out of the tablet market?

It looks like the tablet market might be getting a whole lot smaller next year.


In a surprising move, computer maker powerhouses Hewlett-Packard and Dell are expected to cease all production of tablet computers in 2012.  According to tech rumor website AppleInsider.com,  the hardware manufacturers are unable to supply a streamlined pathway to content that other tablet makers such as Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble can provide, essentially closing them out of the market.  Profits from the sale of content offset the cost of selling tablets at a loss, which almost all tablet makers but Apple are rumored to be doing.  If consumers aren't buying their content directly from Dell or HP, there's no profit to be made.  It's odd that Dell and HP didn't think that far ahead.


HP has already bowed out of the tablet game once, after trying to develop their own software ecosystem with WebOS.  Originally developed by Palm,  HP purchased WebOS in 2009 specifically to enter into the smartphone and tablet market.  In August of this year, HP decided to shut down production of WebOS powered tablets, although the company still produces tablets that run Windows 7.


The decision by Dell and HP to get out of the tablet market could prove to be disastrous for Microsoft, who are hard at work on Windows 8, which is built heavily around the idea of being able to manipulate the interface by touch.  Without these two companies making tablets, Microsoft might just have to build their own, which would put them in quite a bind.  Apple has had 4 years to develop and hone the iTunes store to sell music, movie and applications directly to consumers through their Apple devices.  Microsoft doesn't even have Windows 8 off the ground yet, and already they're playing catch-up.


This could also be seen as bad news for Google, as Dell produces many tablets that run the Android operating system.  One less hardware vendor for Google means one less pathway to consumers.