ooh, ooh... pick me!

I do feel this is kind of a kick in the head. I think it's less about a company's perceived obligation to provide discounts because it's sitting on gabillions in cash (I agree that's a dumb argument), but more about them doing an inane head-fake pretending to jump on the bandwagon of other retailers positioning themselves for a serious attempt at gaining sales in one of the most challenged retail environments anyone has seen in years. AAPL certainly has the prerogative to not participate in the BF deep discount game and rely on the fact that they can and will do well selling upscale products to upscale folks, but this crap about them sending me all kinds of advertisements and teasers stating jargon like "Our biggest sale of the entire year" is just that a headfake- empty and at the very least disingenuous.

I am at the ready to pull the trigger on a MBP, but will tell you as sold as I am on the product, even I simply cannot place an order when comparing comparable prices on similarly speced lappies. And before y'all jump on the "Oh you cannot compare a $600 Dell Latitude with same HDD, dedicated GPU, memory etc to everything that is a MBP- DON'T. I understand and agree with all those arguments- the OS, hardware integrity, etc being the very reasons why I go Apple. But there are orders of magnitude with everything and there is a *massive* price point disparity when you look at what you can get sub $1K versus a $2600 MBP.

All that said, it may be wishful thinking on my part, but those drawing comps to Australia's Black Friday promo (they don't even have a BF) to what's anticipated for the US may be jumping the gun. On the investment side of things, AAPL has really been quite deliberate giving a heads-up to us stockholders that they plan on being particularly aggressive this season which will hurt margins year over year but with the goal of blowing away revenues. So, I think something may still be in the wind which will make us smile.

But unless they come out with a 'get a free 32 GB iPod Touch with the purchase of any MBP' (i claim no personal knowledge should this happen between 12/15 and 12/28 :) then I agree people should be thoroughly annoyed by a company whose playing the BF discount game touting their biggest sale ever with nada backing it up.

Gears of War 2: These ain't no GrassHoppa's!

Gears of War 2: Locust Annihilation

a BB gun cuz I like a challenge!

Interesting- so what's going to happen to the 4yr extended warranty CC sold me on my 52" Sammy for several hundred dollars should the company go belly-up.... or is that a rhetorical question?

they definitely put together the best overall package (over BB) for a home theater system (including Firedog installation), but now this is looking like it may have been a bad decision...

You'll be happy to know Bioshock 2 is, in fact, a prequel.

Colors- u want colors???

http://www.photoshoptalent.com/images/contests/MacBook%20Air%20practice/fullsize/MacBook%20Air%20practice_47c550c04d88b_hires.jpg

Very close.

What people haven't pieced together is the *functionality* behind the single piece block manufacturing process beyond that of structural integrity, which while is definitely of benefit, is actually secondary to it's main purpose- ie opening it for use.

That's when you'll see the collective jaws drop in amazement along with a more pertinent meaning of the 'brick'. Take everything you conventionally know how about the ergonomics involved in using a notebook and throw it out the window.

Oh, and buy some AAPL if you can

Wrong on several points.

Here's what a dev kit looks like

http://i28.tinypic.com/331m6wh.jpg