[UPDATE: Apple has published its Black Friday sale prices, and while the savings on MacBooks and iPods are in line with last year's, there are steep discounts -- 50% and more -- on third party products. The resellers, meanwhile, are offering unually steep price cuts. See MacRumors, AppleInsider and Gizmodo for some of the best bargains. To see what shoppers ended up buying over the first weekend of holiday sales, see Apple's Black Friday bestsellers.]

You know times are tight when even Steve Jobs starts cutting prices.

Apple (AAPL), which keeps the tightest reins on list prices in the business, seems to have loosened them significantly this holiday season. Authorized resellers who normally wouldn't dare chop a nickel off Apple's suggested retail are cutting prices, offering rebates and plastering the Web with gaudy ads.

By Wednesday morning, the white MacBook that still lists for $999 on the Apple Store was selling for $899.99 at BestBuy, $899.95 at B&H Photo, $899.00 at Amazon and $868.99 at Club Mac and Mac Mall.

Apple store managers, meanwhile, are offering to match any advertised price — a policy they quietly followed in the past but now openly acknowledge. (see here)

And Apple.com has posted a pea-green teaser for a one-day Black Friday shopping event that promises unspecified bargains for shoppers willing to brave the crowds the day after Thanksgiving. Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu predicts Apple could be offering discounts of up to 15% on Macs, iPods and accessories, compared with 5%-10% in previous years. (see here)

It's not a price war worthy of Crazie Eddie Antar, but it's more retail aggressiveness than we've seen from Apple, which usually keeps its resellers on a short leash and limits its sales to Black Friday, Back to School and the occasional close-out.

We knew retailers were hurting this year. Now even Cupertino seems to be getting nervous.

Here's bit of upbeat economic news to brighten a gloomy Monday.

On Aug. 1, a London-based investor who calls himself "Tommo_UK" posted a message on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board asking anyone who had bought an iPhone 3G to provide three pieces of data: the serial number (with a few digits X'd out), the date of purchase, and the first 13 digits of the so-called IMEI number.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity is a unique 15 digit number assigned to every cell phone when it is manufactured and can be found on the back of the box in which the iPhone is packaged. Tommo_UK's plan was to gather enough IMEIs to decipher the meaning of those digits and determine Apple's production rate. To get things rolling he offered his own: 01 161200 06652xx, purchased on July 11, the day the iPhone 3G was launched. (link)

Two months later, the TMO's Apple Finance Board — with a lot of help from a member of Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board who calls himself "howlongtoretire" — has gathered IMEIs on nearly 150 iPhone 3Gs and published them in a big Google docs spreadsheet here. The most recent entry: a 8 GB black iPhone manufactured on Sept. 29 and purchased on Oct. 4 that was, according to its IMEI, the 9,190,680th iPhone 3G built this year.

Writing in Bullish Cross on Monday, Andy Zaky and Turley Muller have used this data to make some bold predictions about what Apple is going to say when it releases its quarterly earnings report later this month.

They acknowledge that even if Apple has built more than 9 million iPhones, that doesn't mean they have all been sold. Some of those devices may have been defective. Some may be sitting in inventory on store shelves or loading docks.

But taking all that into account, Zaky and Muller conclude that Apple has probably sold considerably more iPhones last quarter than even the Street's most bullish analysts anticipate. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, for example, predicted on Sept. 22 that Apple would sell 5 million iPhones in its fourth quarter, which ended five days later. (link)

Zaky and Muller's bottom line:

"even if a whopping 1.5 million iPhones of the total IMEI registered devices are unsold as of today, an unlikely assumption, it would still put 3G iPhone sales at 7.6 million units." (link)

Why is 7.6 million significant? Because coming into its fourth quarter, Apple had already sold 2.42 million first-generation iPhones. So if Tommo_UK's IMEI data can be trusted and if Zaky and Muller's analysis is correct, Apple (AAPL) has reached its oft-stated goal of selling at least 10 million iPhones in 2008 with three months to spare.

On Saturday, Aug. 30, the daughters of "BillH" bought an iPhone at an AT&T store in Sunnyvale, Calif. The next day, their father, an Apple investor from Minneapolis, reported on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board (AFB) that the so-called IMEI number on the phone was 01 171400 6049xx x (the last three digits X'd out for safety sake).

That number may not mean anything to you or me, but to a group of Apple watchers, it represents a significant milestone — and a sign that iPhone sales may be running significantly ahead of forecasts.

In a joint project of AFB and Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board, several members have been collecting the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers of every iPhone 3G they can get their hands on and recording them on a big Google speadsheet here.

By tracking the sequence of IMEIs, they can now say, with a fair degree of certainty, that as of Aug. 30, when BillH's daughters bought that phone, Apple had manufactured at least 5,649,000 iPhone 3Gs. Added to the 2.4 million first-generation iPhones the company reported it had sold in the first six months of 2008, that means that Apple has manufactured more than 8 million iPhones this year.

Moreover, with Apple's overseas partners reportedly turning out iPhones at the rate of 800,000 units per week, it seems likely that Apple will build — if not sell — its 10 millionth iPhone before the end of September.

Apple (AAPL) has said repeatedly that it hopes to sell 10 million iPhones in calendar 2008. It looks like the company may meet that goal with several months to spare.

In 2007, Apple sold 3.71 million iPhones.

UPDATE: Apple on Monday issued a press release announcing that it sold its 1 millionth iPhone 3G on Sunday. News from the company has apparently overtaken Gene Munster's analysis, below.

"iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend," said Steve Jobs, according to the press release. "It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world."

Apple offered no further details. In a revised note issued later Monday morning, Munster attributed the discrepancy, at least in part, to how Apple records its sales. See here.

- – - -

In a report that will disappoint investors who were hoping for a 1-million-unit weekend, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster estimated on Monday that Apple and its partners sold less than half that many iPhone 3Gs worldwide in its first three days on the market

[Update: In his revised report, Munster acknowledged that "First weekend estimates exceeded our 425k estimate based on strength in international and improvement in activation process throughout the weekend."]

Still, sales were 40% higher than last year, according to Munster, who [originally estimated that it would] take Apple 17 days to sell 1 million iPhone 3Gs. Last year the company announced the sale of the 1 millionth iPhone 74 days after its first model went on sale.

"The improvement is driven by two key factors," Munster writes. "1) international availablilty in 21 countries, and 2) a 60% lower entry-level price point."

Piper Jaffray's report to clients — the first detailed analysis of iPhone 3G sales — was based on observations of Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) stores in New York and Minneapolis, estimates of the rates of sales, the hours of operation and the number of units supplied to each store, as well as surveys of 283 attendees. It's packed with useful information. The highlights:

• Roughly 425,000 iPhones sold worldwide in three days, despite activation problems [Update: Make that 1 million, per Apple's press release and Munster's revised report.]
• 225,000 sold in the United States, 75,000 in the United Kingdom, an average of 7,000 in each of the other 19 countries [Update: Munster now estimates that 400,000 iPhones were sold in the United States, 250,000 in the United Kingdom and an average of 18,000 each in the other 19 countries.]
• 380,000 sold in the first two days (compared with 270,000 in a day and a half last year) [No update yet.]
• Sales slowed by the approximately 15 minutes it took to activate each phone (sales at Apple stores last year took about 1 minute each)
• 66% of customers purchased the 16 GB iPhone (last year, 91% bought the top-of-the-line 8GB model)
• 38% were upgrading from the original iPhone
• 39% were PC users (versus 25% last year)
• 38% of customers in the United States were new to AT&T as opposed to 52% last year

Below the fold: details from the Piper Jaffray survey and its country-by-country breakdown of estimated sales.

More

End-of-year sales figures for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone in Europe are trickling in, but not in any form that can be definitively pieced together.

That latest news comes from Germany, where the head of Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division said in an online interview Saturday that it had signed on 70,000 customers in the 11 weeks since the device went on sale. (link)

What's not clear is whether that number represents iPhone sales or iPhone activations — an important distinction in T-Mobile's case because for 2 of those 11 weeks it was required by court order to sell unlocked iPhones. Despite the stiff 999 euro ($1,460) price tag it set for unlocked iPhones, the company reported at the time that "many sold." Assuming those buyers activated their iPhones with other carriers, they cannot be counted as T-Mobile customers.

France Telecom's Orange division, meanwhile, reported in early January that it sold 70,000 iPhones in just four weeks. But Orange did say how many iPhones it had activated — sure to be less than 70,000 because Orange was required by French law to sell unlocked iPhones during the entire period.

O2, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the U.K., hasn't issued any sales figures yet, but the Financial Times, citing unnamed "people familiar with the situation," claims sales in the first 8 weeks came in at 190,000. (link)

Four weeks, 8 weeks, 11 weeks. Activated, sold. Locked, unlocked. There's no logical way to sort those number out.

But that hasn't stopped U.S. analysts. When trying last week to unravel the discrepancy between Apple's iPhone sales (3.7 million in 2007) and AT&T's activations (less than 2 million), Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi and Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster both seem to have toted up those numbers, added a fudge factor, and come up with 350,000. (See The case of the missing iPhones.)

Is 350,000 good or bad? It's hard to tell. O2 said it was "happy" with its sales figures, although they seem to have come in below O2's initial target of 200,000 units. Similarly, France Telecom said its 70,000 sales were well within its target range of 50,000 to 100,000, although as Wired points out, CEO Didier Lombard told Europe 1 radio he hoped to sell 100,000 iPhones before the end of the year, not 50,000 to 100,000. (link)

Deutsche Telekom, perhaps wisely, doesn't seem to have issued any public sales target. What Philipp Humm, head of T-Mobile Germany, did say in that online interview yesterday, according to Reuters, is that "the iPhone is by far the most sold multimedia device in T-Mobile's portfolio."

That I believe.

Britons snapped up Apple (AAPL) iPhones at a healthy clip over the weekend, according to sales estimates that appeared in the British press this morning.

The Guardian and The Times quote Peter Erskine, CEO of O2 UK, estimating that "tens of thousands" of the devices were sold at Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores over the weekend. The Mirror, citing an unnamed O2 spokesperson, put the number at 70,000, according to Macworld U.K.

Erskine went on to call the iPhone the fastest-selling device his network has ever seen. He said 2/3 of the iPhone customers were new to O2, which suggests that they were lured away from Vodafone (VOD), Orange or T-Mobile. (link)

The sales figures went a long way to countering early suggestions — including one here — that the iPhone might be getting a tepid reception in the U.K. A thinly reported story in The Register went so far as to call first night of sales a "flop," and Apple stock fell on Monday in part reacting to such perceptions.

But Apple's partners in both the U.K. and Germany, where the iPhone went on sale Friday at midnight, insist that sales met or exceeded their expectations. The U.K. cellphone market is particularly tough to crack because it is so saturated; there are more cellphones in Britain than people.

When population size is taken into account, however, U.K. sales may even have exceeded those in the U.S.

The U.S. population is roughly 300 million. Germany's population is 82 million; the U.K.'s is 60 million.

T-Mobile, which carries the iPhone in Germany, hasn't released weekend sales figures, but said that it sold more than 10,000 iPhones that first day. In the U.S., Apple sold 270,000 iPhones during the first weekend of sales; as many as 200,000 may have been purchased that first day. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster did the math for Germany's first-day sales and calculated that Apple sold 1 iPhone for every 8,200 Germans compared with 1 iPhone for every 1,510 Americans.

If the 70,000 figure for U.K. sales is accurate, Apple may have sold 1 iPhone for every 860 Britains in 2 1/2 days as opposed to 1 iPhone for every 1,111 Americans.

How did Leopard sell?

Very well indeed. In a press release issued this morning, Apple (AAPL) announced that it had sold or delivered more than 2 million copies of OS X 10.5 in its first weekend on the market. OS X Tiger, by comparison, took nearly six weeks to reach the 2 million mark. That makes the launch of Leopard the most successful OS release in Apple's history.

"These numbers show the Mac user base is growing," writes PiperJaffray's Gene Munster. "It also shows that it is an unusually active user base, with 9% of the approximately 23 million users upgrading in the first four days." He notes that there were half as many Macs in circulation in April 2005 when Tiger was released, yet it took Tiger nearly ten times as long to reach 2 million sales.

Comparative sales figures for Microsoft's (MSFT) Vista operating system were not immediately available, but the company is said to have licensed 20 million copies in its first month, a number Leopard is unlikely to surpass. But that's comparing apples and oranges, given the relative size of their respective user bases. Last week Microsoft reported that it had sold 88 million copies of Vista in nine months, representing less than 9% of the worldwide installed base of roughly 1 billion Windows machines.