Here are your Apple rumors and AAPL stock news items for Tuesday:
Apple Does Black Friday: Cupertino, Calif., is quiet on the details, but a placeholder page at Apple‘s (NASDAQ:AAPL) website is warning that the company will indeed be proffering Black Friday deals on the day after Thanksgiving. It appears that Apple’s online retail operation is skipping the whole Cyber Monday thing and attacking retailers’ own Black Friday deals by going straight for the holiday sales jugular. Though it doesn’t say what specifically will be on sale, it does suggest that consumers browse the online store ahead of time. This kind of Black Friday teasing should be considered cruel and unusual.
iPhone 5 Sports NFC Payments in 2012: A Tuesday report at Digitimes (via Mac Rumors) reignited rumors that Apple’s next iPhone will use near-field communications technology for mobile payments when it releases next year. One reason why NFC technology might finally be coming to the iPhone is that carriers Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T (NYSE:T), alongside 45 other operators, have agreed to a standard NFC technology for their networks. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) — in a partnership with Citi (NYSE:C), MasterCard (NYSE:MA) and Sprint (NYSE:S) — released an NFC-enabled Android smartphone in September, making mobile payments with the Google Wallet service possible.
1.2 Million Non-iPad Tablets Sold in U.S., HP Leads Pack: Last quarter, Apple sold 11.2 million iPads. That is a lot. According to the NPD Group, 1.2 million tablets that are not iPads were sold in the U.S. between January and October 2011. That’s not a lot. Among those competitors, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) won the most table scraps. The massive fire sale of the TouchPad tablet in August, with many retailers selling the device for just $99, earned HP a 17% share of the market. Samsung (PINK:SSNLF) came in at second with 16%. Asus followed with a 10% share, with Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) and Acer both taking 9% to close out the top five. Research In Motion‘s (NASDAQ:RIMM) poor BlackBerry PlayBook didn’t place among them. The non-iPad tablet market is changing quickly, though. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is projected to sell 7 million Kindle Fire tablets between now and the end of the year.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned stocks. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook. For more from the company, check out our previous Apple Rumors stories.
