Black Friday

Apple's Grand Central Terminal Store will miss Black Friday

The sign says "arriving soon," but don't hold your breath

Apple (AAPL) hasn't set a date for the grand opening of its fifth Manhattan store, but according to a construction worker who spoke to Mashable's Samantha Murphy, it won't be before December.

For more on the store, see Apple's Grand Central store would be its cheapest in NYC.

Apple Store count: 8.8 iPads sold per hour per store on Black Friday

An analyst monitoring the holiday sales says the iPad is becoming 'the Mac of the masses.'

Several Wall Street analysts spent at least part of Thanksgiving weekend keeping an eye on Apple (AAPL) sales and inventory levels.

The team led by Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore ran the most extensive survey, calling on more than 100 Apple retail stores and 50 resellers, eliciting comments such as "iPads are still selling like crazy," MORE

Today in Tech

Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We've assembled the Thanksgiving weekend's most newsworthy bits below.

"ChromeOS machines could immediately replace 60% of the Windows desktops in the corporate market." -- Linus Upson, VP Engineering of Google Chrome (Fortune)

How Black Friday ads get leaked

Major retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are battling the web sites that post their ads early, but they may have to shoulder some of that blame.

By Daniel Roberts, reporter

Next week brings more than one American tradition: Thanksgiving turkey followed by a rush of frenzied bargain-hunters at the malls on Black Friday.

Unfortunately for some retailers, the Internet has added a new layer to the tradition: their ads posted and MORE

The Mac's cyber Black Friday

Apple's in-store sales fell sharply from 2008, but its online store traffic soared

A pair of reports from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster tell the story.

The first, issued early Monday morning, gave the results of a headcount performed at three Apple (AAPL) retail stores on Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday selling season. Although the stores were busy, his team counted an average of 8.3 Mac sales per hour, down MORE

Apple was 5th busiest retail site on Cyber Monday

Apple.com was the exception in comScore's report on retail sales for Cyber Monday 2008, the biggest online shopping day in a year marked by global financial meltdown.

While its competitors were offering deep discounts to pull in recession-battered customers, Apple (AAPL) had already ended its Black Friday sale and by Monday was back to charging its usual premium prices for laptops, desktops and MP3 players.

Yet its online store still managed to MORE

Black Friday: 13 Macs per hour

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his research team spent 10 hours counting Mac and iPhone sales in five Apple retail stores during the post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, and this is what they saw:

Discounts on seven items (including some Macs but no iPhones) that averaged about 8% off.
Mac sales that averaged 13 units per hour per store, up from 2 per hour clocked earlier in November.
iPhone sales that averaged 3.4 per MORE

Apple's Black Friday bestsellers

In a holiday shopping season that got off to a better start than expected, Apple (AAPL) products sold particularly well -- although not as well as last year, judging from sales at Amazon, America's largest online retailer.

The iPod Touch was Amazon's No. 1 best-selling electronics item Black Friday morning. By Sunday, however, it had dropped to No. 4 after the Kindle reader, a Canon (CAJ) Powershot camera and a Garmin MORE

Apple sale! All Macs must go! -- Update

[UPDATE: Apple has published its Black Friday sale prices, and while the savings on MacBooks and iPods are in line with last year's, there are steep discounts -- 50% and more -- on third party products. The resellers, meanwhile, are offering unually steep price cuts. See MacRumors, AppleInsider and Gizmodo for some of the best bargains. To see what shoppers ended up buying over the first weekend of holiday sales, MORE