Analyst Chris Whitmore and his team at Deutsche Bank did some research regarding Apple’s Black Friday sales this year. They assessed over 100 Apple retail stores and over 100 authorized Apple resellers, such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target. Whitmore declared that about 75 percent completely sold out of iPhone 4S stock by the end of Black Friday.
Across AT&T stores, 50 percent were sold out of the iPhone 4S, and Verizon saw similar stock issues as well. Sprint was apparently able to keep up with demand for the iPhone 4S on its own network, which I suppose could either be a good or bad thing for the carrier.
As one might expect, iPad sales were far from lackluster. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray analyzed a large group of Apple stores for Black Friday and found that sales for the tablet increased 68 percent from last year. On average, individual stores sold 14.8 iPads per hour. To compare, stores on Black Friday last year sold 8.8 iPads per hour.
Unlike the iPhone 4S, Apple did chop off a few bucks for the iPad 2 on Black Friday. The 16GB version got $41 taken off, 32GB got $51 taken off, and 64GB got $61 taken off, which means you could have bought an iPad 2 for as low as $458. iPhone customers were still forced to pay up to $199 with a two-year contract, though there was clearly no adverse effect on sales as a result.