Initial iPhone sellouts replenished on Saturday

New analyst data may back up claims that Apple did extremely well on Black Friday. Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore says his firm checked with over 200 locations, divided between about 100 Apple Stores and 100 AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target outlets. Roughly 75 percent of Apple Stores were sold out of the iPhone 4S by the end of Friday, although by Saturday that number had dropped to 30 percent.

About half of AT&T stores are reported to have been sold out, while Verizon also saw some stockouts. Sprint shops allegedly had enough inventory into meet demand.

Whitmore adds that Apple also appears to have seen strong Mac and iPad sales. The MacBook Air in particular is claimed to have done well, the 11.6-inch model being the most popular. With iPads, Whitmore says he received a few comments pointing to 32GB models being the favorites.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster offers some more concrete figures, based on a separate poll of Apple Stores. iPad sales are said to have measured 68 percent higher than a year ago, selling at an average rate of 14.8 units per hour, up from 8.8. Munster argues that this supports a forecast of 13.5 million iPads during the 2011 holiday quarter.

Mac sales clocked in at a speed of 10.1 per hour, a bump from 23 percent in 2010. Munster is calling for 5.2 million Macs by the end of the quarter.

by MacNN Staff