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Apple's U.S. and Canadian Black Friday Sales Go Live Online With Gift Card Deals

Apple's online stores for the United States and Canada have just come back online for Black Friday's one-day shopping event, and like its stores in Australia and New Zealand, the company is using bonus gift cards rather …

MacRumors Jordan Golson

Context & Ripple Effects

Apple's Black Friday ritual is four years deep in the corpus: a sale teaser in 2010, itemized third-party discount lists the same year, then direct price cuts on iPad, iPod, iMac and MacBooks in 2011 and $100 off MacBook Air/Pros in 2012. The 2013 edition marks a structural break — after running gift-card promotions in Australia and New Zealand and thin savings across European stores on November 28 (Europe savings, Australia gift cards), the U.S. and Canadian online stores have come back online with the same bonus-gift-card mechanic rather than sticker discounts.

The shift matters because it lands in a holiday where Apple's hardware is already moving at full price elsewhere — Walmart's Thanksgiving event logged the iPad Mini as a top-selling tablet — so Apple is defending its own margins while still appearing in deal roundups, which syndicated coverage from Engadget, VentureBeat, ZDNet and others confirms it did widely.

First-order effects

  • U.S. and Canadian shoppers buying Macs, iPads or iPods today receive Apple Store credit whose value depends on future purchases, not an immediate reduction in what they pay at checkout.
  • Apple captures holiday traffic without cutting hardware prices, unlike 2012's $100 MacBook markdowns — every unit sold this year books at full ASP plus a deferred liability on the gift card.

Second-order effects

  • Big-box retailers such as Walmart, which moved iPad Minis during its Thanksgiving event, become the only channel where buyers get a true upfront discount — pushing price-sensitive tablet customers toward competitors' shelves while Apple keeps its own storefront at list.
  • Gift-card redemptions route buyers back into Apple's own software and accessories ecosystem, where the confirmed iOS economics (developers earning 5x more revenue per download than Android) mean each redeemed dollar compounds Apple's services attach rate.

Third-order effects

  • If the gift-card template becomes the annual default, Black Friday stops being a price war Apple participates in and becomes a loyalty instrument — competitors are left to absorb the discounting burden alone, and Apple's global retail calendar converges on one playbook regardless of region.
  • Sustained refusal to discount first-party hardware through economic cycles would entrench premium pricing across the industry's reference products, making retailer-funded subsidies the marginal lever for volume in tablets and laptops.

The trend: Apple is converting its annual Black Friday promotion from direct price cuts into store-credit incentives, trading headline discounts for margin protection and ecosystem lock-in across every market it operates in.

Related: Apple · Apple offers Black Friday savings in Europe, gift cards in Australia · Apple's international Black Friday sale goes live, $100 off MacBook Air/Pros · Black Friday 2010: List of Apple and 3rd Party Discounts

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