Tuesday Apple Rumors — Apple to Offer Own Black Friday Deals

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
Apples 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 doesnt 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 Apples 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. Thats 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 didnt 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