A team of analysts from Piper Jaffray spent Black Friday sitting in Apple (AAPL) stores around the country. Why? To count the number of products being sold.

This shoe-leather research is useful for Gene Munster, the main Apple analyst at Piper Jaffray. He has predicted that Apple will sell 5.5 million iPads this quarter, and he wanted to see how that was holding up.

He thinks the number is still correct. Here's what his team saw on Black Friday, according to Fortune:

Macs were selling at about 8.2 units per hour. That's actually down from last year, when 8.3 units sold per hour, and from two years ago, when 13 units sold each hour.

Still, that's not enough to declare Mac sales flat this year. One measurement firm, NPD, said that Mac sales in October alone were up 20% from the year before, Munster noted in his report. Post continues after video:
But iPads were selling briskly, at 8.8 units per hour. Since this is the first Black Friday when iPads were selling, we can't compare with prior years. But it was enough for Munster to stick with his 5.5 million prediction.

"We noticed that the iPad is gaining traction (driven by lower price vs. the Mac) among demographics in which the Mac has historically not been successful," he wrote in his report. "The bottom line is that Apple's addressable market is expanding with the iPad."

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