Hasta La Gadget!

Now that you’ve finished sleeping off that turkey coma, it’s time to participate in that most truly American of activities: buying lots of stuff that you can’t possibly afford.

Apple is almost certain to have some amazing sales numbers this holiday, thanks in no small part to 2010’s runaway success of the iPad, which has made its way to the top of countless shopping shopping lists.

As is its tradition, the company is marking Black Friday with that rarest of things: a genuine discount on Apple products. Apple has done a pretty good job keeping quiet about the deals thus far. The company sent out a teaser to customers, but otherwise kept quiet.

The Black Friday discounts are in place, and it looks like a pretty solid spread, with deals on iPads, iMacs, iPods, Macbooks,software, and accessories galore. Check out some of the better deals after the jump.

Happy Black Thursday! Also known as Thanksgiving, in some circles. As you sit down with family to a crowded dinner table, in celebration, remember to be thankful for the folks at Amazon working hard through the holiday to bring you some early holiday deals.

The site has been celebrating Black Friday all week, and will continue to do so until Cyber Monday rolls around in a few days. After the jump, check out some of Thursday’s best Black Friday Deals (Black Thursday is the new Black Friday, after all).

Carry an iPod-size rechargeable external battery to double or triple your phone’s talk time or your MP3 player’s playback time. They all have a USB jack; plug your device’s cord into that and you’re up and running again. The cheapest, smallest units provide a half-charge to a cellphone or MP3 player battery and take up little space in a purse or shoulder bag until needed; the largest provide 2-3 charges of a phone or music player. Recharge them by plugging into a laptop/PC’s USB jack, or into a USB wall transformer. Prices run $15-$50. The powerpack is good for 500 charges. One of the more sophisticated is the Energizer XP2000 Universal Rechargeable Power Pack, $30 street, with its own car and wall recharging transformers, four power tips, and carry case. There are many, many other choices.

It sounds like a geeky gift – compared to jewelry, it certainly  is –  but almost everyone needs a backup server. Online backup is nice but only if you have a couple gigabytes of data to protect; I’ve got 2 terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) each of photos and videos, a lot of music, and several hundred gigabytes of data including scans of every document of significance since college. (Hey, I’m a Type A.) That calls for a home backup server, personal file server, or NAS (network attached storage) device. Three names, same thing: One device automatically backs up (and shares files among) every PC, Mac, notebook and netbook in the house. A long-running pcmag.com favorite has been the HP MediaSmart EX series (see pcmag.com review) and you can’t go wrong, especially for sharing photos online. (About $515 direct with one 1.5TB drive and three bays empty.) I’ve thrown my lot with the Synology DiskStation four bay series that isn’t quite as idiotproof on setup and remote access as the HP, but the prices are sensational, as low as $375 for a diskless box, then shop for the best deal on hard drives. Add four 2-TB drives at $100 apiece and with the magic of Synology’s RAID 5 controller, your 8GB of drive space effectively gives you 6 TB of redundant storage that survives the loss of a hard disk (which happens sooner or later). With HP’s technology, you get redundancy by using a second drive.

I’m trying to imagine what I might have done with an iPad at age six–it most likely would have involved crushing a lot of action figures with the thing. Naturally, kids today are for more savvy than in the primitive 1980s when I grew up. According to a new study from Nielsen, Apple’s tablet is the most requested gift for kids aged six to 12.

According to Nieslen’s numbers, 31-percent of children aged six to 12 are “interested in buying” an iPad in the next six months. Again, I’m not sure what allowances are like these days, but I image most of the kids who fall within that bracket are going to need a little extra help from the parents.

Number two on the list is the generic “computer,” followed by the iPod touch. Gaming consoles don’t even enter into it until the number four spot, the Nintendo DS, which is followed by the PS 3. Also on the list: the iPhone, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, PlayStation Move, Blu-Ray player, and Xbox 360.

The aforementioned generic computer topped the list for those surveyed above the age of 13. Also in the top five: television set, non-iPhone smartphone, the iPad (at 18 percent), and a Blu-ray player.