Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stomps Microsoft (MSFT) In Black Friday Sales

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No surprise here, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) beat Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) this Black Friday in terms of sales and retail traffic. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster conducted and eight hour observation of one Apple retail store in Minneapolis on November 23rd (Black Friday). Their research shows that store traffic was up 31 percent this year compared to last year. They also discovered that on average, 17.2 items were purchased every hour.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stomps Microsoft (MSFT) In Black Friday Sales

Munster and his team also spent time at the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) store. Unfortunately, they only spent two hours (a drastically shorter time period compared to the amount of time they spent at Apple) and discovered that 3.5 items were purchased an hour. Most of the purchases were of the XBox game console, none of  which were the new Surface tablet.

Munster also pointed out that the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) store saw 47% less traffic than the Apple store.

Despite the major gains for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), there are still a few misses for Apple. The store had a limited supply of their most popular version of the iPad Mini (the 16GB version) and sales for the iPad generally trump sales for the Mac.  However, overall sales for the iPad slipped a little. This year, the Apple store sold 11 iPads an hour, last year they sold 14.8 iPads an hour. Munster admits that this shouldn’t be a significant concern, as more people opt to shop online instead of in-store.

Although it’s evident that more people want an iPad than a Surface, I’ve got to admit that it was a little unfair that Munster didn’t spend an equal amount of time at both stores, which makes the results a little unbalanced. Beyond that, Munster’s results were no surprise. It’s been predicted that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) would have a great start this holiday season and although the numbers may have been a little lower than initially estimated, it still looks like they’re going to have a terrific holiday season.

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