So it's that time of year again where every gadget site on the internet pretends to have inside sources at Best Buy. I don't have inside sources at Best Buy. What I have is a couple weeks of watching leaked circulars show up on the usual forums, plus some plain common sense about what's been selling this fall. Here's my best guess at what Black Friday is actually going to look like this year.
The Kindle Fire is the story, whether Amazon likes it or not
Amazon's Kindle Fire has only been out since November 15th and it's already impossible to find at $199 without a wait. My money says Black Friday doesn't really discount it much further, because why would they, it's already priced like a loss leader. What I do expect is bundle nonsense. Free case, free extra month of Prime, maybe a gift card thrown in at Target or Walmart to get people in the door before 5am. If you actually want one, don't expect a miracle price. Expect a slightly nicer box.
iPads will get cut, not the new stuff
Nobody's discounting an iPhone 4S this year, carriers don't do that to a phone that's six weeks old, especially not one with Siri still being the thing everyone's showing off at Thanksgiving dinner (mine still thinks I'm asking about a "beer" every time I say "Siri"). But the iPad 2, that's a different story. I'd bet real money we see $50-$75 off 16GB iPad 2s at Target, Best Buy, and Walmart, maybe bundled with a gift card instead of a straight price cut so Apple's MAP pricing rules don't get too bent out of shape. That's basically what happened around this same point last year with the original iPad, so there's no reason to think this year's different.
Android tablets are going to get dumped at fire-sale prices
This is the one I'm actually excited about. There's a graveyard of 7 and 10 inch Android tablets that came out this year trying to ride the iPad's coattails and mostly flopped, and retailers are sitting on inventory they need gone before Christmas. I wouldn't be surprised to see some no-name 7-inchers under $150, and even some semi-known brands getting knocked down hard. None of them run Ice Cream Sandwich yet, that's still rolling out slowly on the Galaxy Nexus and basically nothing else, so don't buy one of these expecting a software future. Buy it because it's cheap and you want to mess around with Android.
Laptops: nothing exciting, just the usual door-buster games
Every year it's the same trick. Some laptop nobody's heard of, some weird off-brand with a Celeron chip in it, priced at $199 or $229 to get 400 people standing outside a store at 4am. I fell for one of these two years ago (a Compaq that overheated so badly I could've used it to toast bread) so I'm allowed to say: skip the doorbusters, they're bait. If you want an actual decent Windows laptop, wait till the ads are all out and compare real specs, not just the number on the sign.
Nobody's buying you a Windows tablet, don't ask
There's still no real Windows 8 to buy, just the developer preview that's been floating around since September for people who like living dangerously with their beta software. So there's nothing to put on sale there. If someone tries to sell you some "Windows tablet deal" this week it's almost certainly running Windows 7 with a resistive touchscreen, and no, you don't want that, trust me.
A word on the doorbuster lines themselves
I'm not standing in a Best Buy parking lot at 3:45am for anything. I did that once, in 2008, for a TV that turned out to have a dead pixel dead center in the screen, and I've made peace with paying ten extra dollars to sleep instead. If you're the type who enjoys the chaos, more power to you, just watch out for the stores that only stock two or three units of the headline doorbuster and fifty of the mediocre "similar" item they'd rather move.
Anyway, that's my read on it. We'll see how much of this I got wrong by Friday night.