Apple tidbits: Black Friday, mobile gaming, and MobileMe

Deep one-day discounts on products such as the new MacBook could be coming this Black Friday.

(Credit: CNET)

Here's a rundown of some of the Apple news making the rounds this Wednesday:

Apple may launch most aggressive Black Friday pricing yet--AppleInsider: On a day when the stock market tanked once again on news of shifting priorities in the government's bailout plan, coupled with pessimistic forecasts from huge retailers like Best Buy, this notion doesn't seem all that far-fetched. Last year, Apple offered $101 discounts on MacBooks and other discounts on iPods on Black Friday, and Ben Reitzes of UBS thinks similar discounts could be applied more broadly across Apple's product line on that particular day.

Apple's iPhone faces off with the game champs--The Wall Street Journal: Is the "funnest iPod ever" something that should have Nintendo and Sony worried? Steve Jobs certainly thinks so, pointing out in this story (paid registration required) that a quarter of all the applications downloaded from the App Store have been games. The iPhone and iPod Touch may not yet be the choice of serious portable gamers, but Sega shared an interesting tidbit on how it views the iPhone: the 500,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball sold through the App Store would be considered a hit if it had sold that many copies of a game for the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.

Apple focusing on MobileMe improvements in latest 10.5.6 builds--MacRumors: Everyone's favorite whipping-boy in the Apple universe--MobileMe--has received a great deal of work in the next update for Mac OS X Leopard, according to MacRumors. The update will supposedly have improvements to how MobileMe syncs data between MacBooks and the online service, which lets you access contacts, calendars, and other data from any computer.

The genius behind Steve--Fortune: This actually came out earlier in the week, but Adam Lashinsky's profile of Apple COO Tim Cook is worth a read if you haven't checked it out already. There's not a lot of new ground broken--Cook is the obvious short-term solution if Steve Jobs had to step down as Apple's leader, since he's a clear No. 2 and has already run the company once before--but the insights into Cook's personality and working style make it worth your time if you were ever curious about Apple's second-in-command.

[Mr. Dee]

Tom, do you read AppleInsider all day? Because all I see is blatant regurgitation of information on that site on your blog? Might as well tell your readers to just tune their RSS Feeds to AppleInsider.

[Enzos2]

I find this baffling... today (Thu) is the 13th and next month the 13th is on a Saturday. How can Friday 27th be Black Friday? Or is this some strange American custom?

[UITD]

Its a strange American custom of the bastardization of the holiday called Christmas. Somehow, retailers hijacked our holiday and turned one of the most important Christian holidays into a disgusting sales and marketing event that lasts from thanksgiving to Christmas.

People will actually trample and kill others to get 20% of TVs. Much like the fat lady in New Orleans who stole the TV during Katrina, people act in some disgusting ways.

Normal folks celebrate Christmas for what it really is and STAY OUT of the stores during this time. The rest of the animals feed off the sales using cues from the whacked out media who tells them they need to "do their part" and take money from their savings (or better, money they DONT HAVE) and give it to retailers who could give two ***** about them as customers.

Basically, thats it in a nutshell.

[man290663]

The relevance of this article to the 99.8% of the world that are not in the USA is....

come on guys make this a bit more international - as much as you'd like it there is a bit more to the world than the United States of Xenaphobia..

[ckurowic]

Uh, this is a US based site.

[kelmon]

To be fair, only the part about potential Black Friday discounts will apply to the US. Everything else is pretty universal, if not exactly exciting.

@ckurowic

Whether your comment is really relevant depends on the proportion of readers who live in the US. Know your customer...

[iertry]

@kelmon

I understand what you said about how it depends on the portion of readers who live in the US but in my opinion it is a US site. For example if your from the UK you shold visit www.cnet.co.uk which is aimed at UK consumers. I think they are the only two CNET sites though .co.uk for UK and .com for US (obviously then readers from other countries have to choose between the two).