MacRumors

9to5Mac reveals the prices for Apple's 2011 Black Friday sales. The discounts are in line with last year's prices, with only modest discounts on the company's products. Price drops for Apple's core products are as follows:

iPad 2 - $41 to $61 Off
iPod nano - $11 off
iPod Touch - $21 to $41 off
MacBook Air - $101 off
MacBook Pro - $101 off
iMac - $101 off

Meanwhile, 3rd party accessories are also seeing some small discounts ranging from $11-$101.95 in savings for accessories such as iPad Smart Covers, iPhone battery packs and external hard drives.

These prices should be available for both online and local retail Apple store locations. For those who were planning to purchase from Apple retail anyway, it makes sense to wait until Friday. Customers eligible for Apple's educational pricing on Macs may also want to compare prices, as some models have better standard educational pricing while others have better Black Friday pricing.

For those looking for more savings, other online retailers frequently have their own Black Friday sales on Apple products as well. Depending on your location, those other online retailers may provide the added advantage of not charging sales tax on online orders. Apple's online store does charge local sales tax on all orders when applicable.

Bloomberg reports that Apple has opened up a new class of App Store offerings, allowing game publisher Big Fish Games to offer a monthly subscription package that will allow provide users with access to a number of the company's games through a dedicated iPad app [App Store].

The setup is similar to Netflix Inc. (NFLX)’s streaming application for the iPad. Subscribers can get unlimited access to games such as “Mystery Case Files” and the “Mahjong Towers” series from inside the Big Fish app.

Games played through the subscription service, which are streamed to a user’s iPad from Big Fish’s data centers, will initially require Wi-Fi access to play.

The standard package from Big Fish Games will launch as a $4.99 monthly subscription, increasing to $6.99 per month early next year as more game titles become available for the app. A free ad-supported option limiting play to 30 minutes per day will also be available.

Update: Big Fish Games has put out a press release announcing the new subscription service.

With Big Fish’s Play Instantly!, anyone with a Wi-Fi internet connection can launch and begin playing any game in the catalog within seconds. The service is free for a limited time each day, or available as an unlimited, full-screen experience with access to all of the games in the service via a monthly subscription. As these games run in the cloud, Play Instantly! users can play games immediately with no additional download or installation process. Each player’s progress for each game is saved in the cloud, allowing them to pick up where they left off regardless of the device they are using. Players can jump into any game, exit out and later pick up where they left off on the same device they started on, or on any other supported device.

Initially available only in the U.S., the new service currently offers dozens of games, with new games added every week. The company is planning an expansion to several hundred titles and new Android, Mac, and PC platforms by next year.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is actively looking to recruiting new senior-level executives to assist with the company's cloud-based services. The moves come as Apple undoubtedly seeks to build upon its iCloud services officially launched last month.

In recent weeks, Apple has been looking to recruit senior-level executives with backgrounds in Web-based software, according to people familiar with the matter. It has approached at least one prominent Internet entrepreneur since at least earlier this year about a possible position, according to these people, who say the details of the possible job were unclear. The company has also discussed its needs with recruiters, one of the people said.

According to the report, Apple is thinking about building new cloud-based web applications with an eye toward toward reducing the number of devices people need to carry with them on the go.

Apple has already been working to build up its cloud-focused team at the engineering level, and is now looking at filling out the more senior ranks. Toward that end, sources have indicated to The Wall Street Journal that Apple is looking broadly for talented Web-focused managers who might be good fits for the company at the director level or above rather than recruiting for specific positions.

Apple's iCloud effort is currently overseen by Eddy Cue, who was promoted to the senior vice president level back in September as his role has grown in both visibility and responsibility as he has taken on iCloud, the iBookstore, and iAd in addition to his long-standing position leading the iTunes Store and App Store effort.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Apple was set to announce its grand opening plans for its massive new Grand Central Terminal retail store today, with rumors suggesting that Apple would open the store this Friday or "shortly thereafter".

Mashable now reports that construction workers at the site have indicated that a significant amount of work still remains to be done and that the opening "won't be any time too soon."

Although many anticipated that Apple would open its Grand Central Terminal store in New York City before Black Friday, construction workers at the location confirmed on Tuesday that it won’t be ready in time. The store, opening in the highly-trafficked commuter terminal, will be Apple’s largest retail venue.

“It won’t be any time too soon,” a construction worker at the site told Mashable. “We still have a lot to do, so my guess is that it will be ready in December.”

Early reports had targeted a mid-November opening for the project as Apple rushed to try to have the store open by the start of the busy holiday shopping season, but it appears that the company will not meet that goal. The company had been pursing an aggressive four-month buildout schedule made possible by the fact that major alterations to the building's structure are not permitted, but it seems that there still is some work left to be done.

Research firm NPD today released a new study of non-iPad tablet sales in the United States, revealing that sell-through remains extremely small in the face of Apple's dominant market share. According to the report, only 1.2 million non-iPad tablets were sold in the United States during the first ten months of 2011, with HP leading the pack with 17% of that market, or about 200,000 units sold.

HP famously discontinued its TouchPad tablet just weeks after it launched, although the company has been periodically offering stocks of the device at bargain basement prices as low as $99 or as part of bundles with HP computers.

PC manufacturers are dominant in the tablet space, as four of the top five tablet brands already have a strong U.S. consumer PC presence. Only two of the top five brands play in the smartphone market.

“The market is filled with long-time PC and phone brands as well as low-cost entrants,” stated Baker. “With a limited amount of shelf space and challenges in overcoming the iPads first mover strength, not all brands will be successful.”

Apple's sales performance is not included in the study, but it is clear that the total of 1.2 million non-iPad tablets fails to come close to Apple's sales numbers. For the first three quarters of 2011, Apple reported total iPad sales of just over 25 million iPads on a worldwide basis, and while the company does not break out its U.S. iPad sales, that number is almost certainly well above 10 million units, putting Apple in the neighborhood of 90% sales share.

Recent studies have pegged Apple's share of iPad shipments at closer to 65-70%, but those studies measure shipments from manufacturers to distribution channels and not sales to end users. While Apple has repeatedly noted that it is selling every iPad it can make, competitors' devices still appear to be languishing on store shelves amid low interest from consumers.

Over the weekend, we noted that the new VMware Fusion 4.1 release added the ability for users to virtualize Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Leopard client versions. Previous virtualization options had been limited to the client version of OS X Lion and server versions of Lion, Snow Leopard, and Leopard.

VMware now reports in a blog post, however, that the change was an error in a new license verification implementation and that the company is developing an update to properly disallow virtualization of Snow Leopard and Leopard client versions.

VMware Fusion 4.1 was released late last week and includes many great improvements. One change was the introduction of a new license verification step for users to verify they are in compliance with the OS licensing terms.

When the license verification step was added in VMware Fusion 4.1 the server edition check was omitted. We are preparing an update.

VMware has offered no timeframe for the release of the patched version of Fusion 4.1, and it is unclear whether Apple itself has been involved in pushing VMware to fix its error. Apple's official statement on the initial discovery, provided to Macworld, reiterated that client versions of Snow Leopard and Leopard are not included on the list of operating system versions for which virtualization is allowed, but did not directly address VMware's error in license verification in Fusion 4.1.

Earlier this month, we noted that Apple had filed a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in an attempt to gain control of several iPhone-related domain names that had been registered by another party and set to forward to a porn site. Most notable among these domain names was iPhone4S.com, the highest-profile domain associated with Apple's new iPhone hardware.

Domain Name Wire now reports that Apple has won control over the domain names in question, as the UDRP case has been terminated following the defendant's agreement to turn the domains over to Apple.

Apple terminated the case after the owner of the domains agreed to turn the domain names over. The whois record for the domains changed to brand protection company MarkMonitor today.

MarkMonitor is the brand protection agency used by Apple and a number of other large companies to anonymously manage such holdings as domain names. As a word of warning to our readers, the domain names in question continue to forward to the porn site at this time, as the site continues to point to the previous owner's DNS server settings and only the various contact information fields for the site are appearing under MarkMonitor at this time.

Of the seven domain names, Apple is only expected to utilize iPhone4S.com, which it will presumably redirect to the company's main iPhone page at some point in the relatively near future. Apple will likely simply shut down the other six domain names while preventing others from using them.

Following conflicting rumors about whether the iPhone 4S would include near field communication (NFC) technology (rumors that were eventually decided in the negative), Digitimes reports that Apple is indeed one of the vendors still expected to introduce NFC-enabled operating system software (and thus hardware) in 2012. Apple's inclusion of NFC in next year's iPhone would appear to come as part of a tipping point for the technology, with the technology's prevalence in the smartphone industry set to increase from about 10% to over 50% in the span of two to three years.

As Android, Symbian, BlackBerry and Bada have supported NFC (near field communication) functions and Microsoft and Apple plan to make Windows Phone and iOS support NFC in 2012, the proportion of NFC-enabled smartphones will quickly increase from less than 10% currently to over 50% in two to three years, according to Taiwan-based smartphone makers.

NFC standardization issues have been one problem slowing adoption of the technology, but with 45 wireless carriers including AT&T and Verizon now signed on to a SIM-based standard, those issues may be reaching a resolution.

Back-and-forth rumors about whether NFC would appear in the 2011 version of the iPhone led to considerable uncertainty about where Apple stood on the technology, with The New York Times noting in March that NFC would be a part of a "coming iteration" of the iPhone without specifying a product generation. By mid-May, Bernstein analysts correctly predicted not only that NFC would not be included in Apple's forthcoming iPhone hardware but that the new iPhone would be an iPhone 4S and not a radically redesigned iPhone 5.

iPad 3 rumors seem to be ramping up. DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim now tells CNet that Apple has started production of a 2048x1536 resolution iPad 3 display.

"It's happening--QXGA, 2048x1536. Panel production has started [for the next-generation iPad]. There's three suppliers," Richard Shim, an analyst at DisplaySearch, said in an interview today. Shim confirmed other reports that cite three companies, Samsung, Sharp, and LGD.

DisplaySearch is research firm focused specifically on the display supply chain market and related industries. The same claims have been previously made by Digitimes who also cited the same three suppliers.

We've already seen evidence from Apple that they've been working on resolutions of that size in versions of their iOS applications. Most recently, background images of exactly 2048x1536 were found in early builds of iOS 5. In comparison, the current iPad carries a resolution of 1024x768. The iPad 3 is expected to be released sometime in the first half of 2012.

Digitimes has been the source of many supplier rumors for Apple's upcoming products, though their accuracy is always up for some debate. Based on our own record keeping at this time, Digitimes has had about a 55% accuracy on rumors that could later be validated.

A new codename finding by 9to5Mac in the latest iOS 5 betas seems to confirm that Digitimes has been accurate about some of their reporting on the upcoming iPad 3.

The "J2" model listed above corresponds to recent report in which Digitimes discusses two prototype models codenamed J1 and J2 that Apple has been working on.

Apple is currently giving two tablet PC projects codenamed J1 and J2 to its upstream partners for development. The sources revealed that the major differences of the new tablet PCs compared to the previous model are their size, specifications and technologies.

Since the new tablet PCs have a higher resolution, Apple has demanded the design of the light source to be changed from a single LED light bar to two LED light bars on the left and right sides of the machine, but since the method of adopting two LED light bars has created difficulty in shrinking the machine's thickness, some vendors have come out with designs that only adopt one light bar, but are packing two LED chips into one package.

The report is quite vague but does touch on an issue that has appeared from other sources as well.

The issue of the the higher resolution screen of the iPad 3 requiring a second light bar for the iPad 3 was also reported by Digitimes. iLounge later reported that the new iPad 3 would end up being 0.7mm thicker than the iPad 2 due to this need to incorporate a dual light bar system to support the higher-resolution display.

Apple is widely believed to be working on an iPad 3 with a "Retina" display that may double the iPad's screen resolution. Persistent rumors have suggested that Apple's partners have had difficulties in mass producing such screens.

Apple's newly launched iPhone 4S has quickly shot up to become the second most popular Cameraphone on Flickr.com. Flickr's Camera Finder page shows graphs of the popularity of both smartphones and Point and Shoot cameras.

The iPhone 4S has beaten out the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and HTC EVO 4G, but still lags behind the original iPhone 4. The iPhone made headlines in 2009 when it became the most popular camera on Flickr, even beating out all dedicated non-smartphone cameras. The iPhone 4S still has a ways to go before dethroning the iPhone 4, which remains the most popular overall camera on Flickr.

The iPhone 4S introduced a number of significant improvements to its camera, drawing praise from many. Arstechnica recently posted a comparison pitting the iPhone 4S camera against several others, and found the 4S with competitive image quality and the advantage of convenience.

Thanks @rogerdodgerTM

As noted by MacStories, Apple has started posting teaser announcements about their Black Friday holiday sale for Friday, November 25th. The teaser first appeared on their Australian online store and will likely be propagating around the world.

The special one-day Apple shopping event. This Friday, November 25.

Mark your calendar now, and come back to the Apple Online Store for the special one-day event. You'll discover amazing iPad, iPod and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.

Apple's discounts are typically relatively small compared to other retailers. Last year, Apple offered $101 discounts on their iMac, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines, with $11-$41 discounts on the iPods and iPads.

Online and retail stores are already starting to promote their upcoming "Black Friday" sales. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States and marks the traditional start to the holiday shopping season. The day brings early store openings and deep discounts from many retailers, and ranks as one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

BestBuy has posted a preview their Thanksgiving/Black Friday sales advertisement already showing the following discounts on Apple products:

- $45 off an iPad 2
- $150 off $1199 MacBook Pro
- $150 off $1199 iMac
- $10 off $99 Apple TV
- $100 iTunes Card for $80

Apple also typically participates in Black Friday sales with more moderate discounts. Last year, Apple offered $101 discounts on their iMac, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines, with $11-$41 discounts on the iPods and iPads.

Online retailers MacMall and MacConnection also offer similar online sales, typically offering the deepest available discounts. We'll provide more coverage on specific discounts as Black Friday approaches.

SemiAccurate reports that Apple will be transitioning back to NVIDIA from AMD as its graphics chip supplier for the next-generation MacBook Pro models offering discrete graphics. The move comes after Apple just recently completed a multi-year effort to switch its entire Mac lineup from NVIDIA to AMD.

Yes, your read that right, Nvidia has won the next round of Macs, likely starting with the Ivy Bridge models next spring. About three years after the decision to boot Nvidia out of the company was made, and two years after the first ATI/AMD Macs in recent memory hit the shelves, you will see Nvidia macs reappearing. I guess ‘never’ at Apple means single digit years.

The report notes that discrete graphics for notebooks are a shrinking market as notebooks become smaller and thinner and integrated graphics solutions from the likes of Intel and AMD continue to improve.

Graphics performance has indeed been an issue for Apple's smallest machines over the past several years as it has sought to balance both CPU and GPU performance. Licensing restrictions from Intel prevented third-party graphics manufacturers such as NVIDIA from building integrated graphics solutions for Intel's most recent processors, forcing Apple to choose between subpar integrated graphics from Intel and older Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs that could still be paired with third-party integrated graphics.

With Intel's integrated graphics improving significantly over the past year, Apple has finally been able to transition its small notebooks to all-Intel solutions, while its larger notebooks continue to offer switchable graphics using the integrated Intel and discrete AMD options. It now appears, however, that Apple will be moving back to NVIDIA for those discrete options.

As integrated graphics continues to improve, they may also eat into the discrete GPU market in larger machines. Apple is also said to be preparing to launch a thinner 15" notebook, although it is unclear at this time whether it will be positioned as a MacBook Pro revamp or a new MacBook Air size. There is no word yet on Apple's plans for the new machine's capabilities, but it seems reasonable that Apple may at some point begin transitioning larger machines in the thinner form factors that have proven very popular with consumers to integrated graphics alone.

The report from SemiAccurate does not address Apple's GPU plans for its desktop models, which also currently utilize AMD for their discrete graphics after also having been included in the recent transition from NVIDIA to AMD.