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Making an album of new songs seems to be too much like hard work for bands these days. It’s so much easier to pay some developers to make an app instead.

At Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, they serve up to 15,000 meals per day to some of the illuminati of tech, including more than a few celebrities, without a blink. But according to Google superchef Charlie Ayers, when Steve Jobs entered the Google cafeteria, everything was different: the employees parted like “Moses before the Red Sea.”

Jobs liked Ayers’s food so much that when Ayers left Google to open his own restaurant, the Calafia Cafe, Steve Jobs followed him, and even brought his entire family to the restaurant for a last-minute Easter dinner. Even though he was a regular, Ayers says no one ever approached Steve Jobs, except one customer: a little boy who asked for (and received) an autograph. Awww.

[via Forbes]

The Recording Industry Association of America has targeted a business called ReDigi that specializes in selling “used” iTunes tracks online. While ReDigi promises users its practice is perfectly legal, the RIAA is having none of it, and wants the company closed down.

It demands the company abandon its business and its “infringing activities,” and hands over its sales records to the RIAA. It also wants ReDigi to open its servers so that the music files held by the company cannot be exploited.

As part of the streaming video on demand service’s push towards consolidating its user interface across all tablets, Netflix just unveiled the new GUI to their official iPad app. Sayonara, whitespace!

We’ve seen a lot of Steve Jobs tributes since his death in October, but this one is particularly impressive. Speed painter Aaron Kizer took to the stage at the 11th Hour Live Music and Arts Show in Owensboro, Kentucky and in a blur of brushes painted an incredible portrait of Steve Jobs in just six minutes.

Remarkable. Check out the full video below.

In an intriguing note, a Wall Street analyst suggests Samsung — you know, the South Korean company keeping Apple’s legal department in yachts and private islands — could be one of the beneficiaries of $3.4 billion Apple will spend to retool suppliers’ factories in 2012. Or Apple could just build itself a couple of state-of-the-art chip factories from scratch.

The guys over at G-Form go to extreme lengths to show off the impressive capabilities of their gadget cases, like dropping a 12lb. bowling ball on the iPad, and throwing a perfectly good MacBook Pro off of a balcony.

The iPad becomes their victim again in this latest stunt, which is intended to show off the incredible strength of the company’s Extreme Edge and Extreme Portfolio cases, as they’re dropped from 1,300 feet.

Sometimes you need to give your iPhone just a little bit more oomph. Maybe you need to output just a little more sound so you can DJ the impromptu breakdancing showdown that’s spontaneously popped up in your NYC subway car, or maybe you need to give your iPhone’s battery a jolt after being declared MTA Breakdancing Champion Of The Lower Boroughs And The Universe.

Either way, Spar’s Zephyr has got you covered. Think of it as a metallic JamBox with a lightning rod inside: a Bluetooth speaker and hands-free speakerphone, paired with an external battery that can juice up your iPhone in a pinch.

A Vietnamese book publisher has just published a touching, beautifully designed 2012 memorial calendar to the life of Steve Jobs, filled with the most iconic Steve shots of the last thirty years and aspirational quotes from the fiery, passionate Apple founder himself on the way to live life.

If the U.S. makes it easier for tourists to enter the country, more of them will come to spend their money – especially on electronic gadgets, Fox News maintains.

They make the case for iPad buyers from Brazil, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Despite the evidence that they’ll be soon making iPads and iPhones there, nightmarishly high tariffs still make the U.S. a better place to buy Apple products. (By the way, Cult of Mac will be in Sao Paulo Nov. 20, come say hi and talk about all things Apple in Brazil).

After missing its initial October launch date, iTunes Match finally went live yesterday, but only for those in the United States. Users in other territories are left waiting for the music matching service, with no indication of when its international rollout may begin.

Those in the U.K. may be the next to get the service, according to a CNET report, but it won’t arrive until at least the start of 2012.

Apple has issued a video update for its 15-inch MacBook Pro that addresses a freezing issue users some users may be suffering with the mid-2010 model. The update also fixes a bug that presented users with a blank screen when they attempted to watch a video on their machine.

Apple’s MacBook Air has been an incredibly popular machine since the company introduced solid-state drives as standard and reduced its price tag back in October 2010. But for some, it just doesn’t come big enough.

However, dreams of a 15-inch model are about to come true, according to sources in Apple’s supply chain. And it’ll be here by March 2012.

Adding to their now dizzying array of cloud-in-box hardware and desktop app that turns your Mac into a cloud server, Pogoplug has just unveiled a web-based cloud service that can be used as a standalone media storage option, and either accessed through a web browser, or through the desktop or Universal iOS app. And just like Apple did with iCloud, they’re giving the first five gigs away for free.

The man behind the popular iA Writer app, Oliver Reichenstein, has posted some interesting observations on the App Store ecosystem. In a Google+ post titled “Revenue = X,” the founder of Information Architects explains how his decision to drop the price of iA Writer on the Mac and iPad has resulted in a way to “increase exposure without affecting profit.”

Dropping iA Writer’s price has resulted in more purchases than expected, and Oliver’s profits have largely stayed the same since he made his app cheaper.

Adobe recently announced that it was effectively killing Flash for mobile devices, and the company’s Principal Product Manager has felt the need to take to his blog and share the reasons that Flash failed.

Hardware fragmentation, the growth of HTML5, and Apple itself all played into Adobe’s decision to end Flash.

If you were one of the millions to buy the iPhone 4S, today is your last day to order AppleCare+ coverage. Apple introduced a new type of AppleCare with the iPhone 4S, and the deadline for adding the coverage to your policy is today, November 14th.

AppleCare+ gives customers a two-year warranty and coverage for two incidents of accidental damage. The plan costs $99 and is highly recommended for any new iPhone owner.

Oh, wow. The engineers over at app developing firm Applidium say they’ve cracked Siri’s security protocol wide open. In fact, using their method, they say that any app and any device can now use Siri in theory. In reality, though? There are a few obstacles remaining.

iTunes Match went live earlier today as a beta, but Apple apparently can’t handle the demand: it’s already temporarily unavailable for new subscribers, who are being told to “check back in an hour.”

Honestly, want our advice? Check back in a week. Even in developer beta, iTunes Match took ages to match our libraries, and a million people hammering on the service on launch day isn’t going to help matters.

Okay, we’re stretching it a bit with the headline, but we couldn’t resist: Apple has just sent a shut down notice to an online retailer called iPopMyBaby that sells nothing but onesies and diapers featuring Apple’s products: namely, the iPod clickwheel and iPhone homescreen.

The iPhone 4S has some bodacious battery life problems and no one seems to know what’s going on. Apple themselves have released an iOS update, iOS 5.0.1, to fix the problems, to no avail. Meanwhile, some iPhone 4S owners find their batteries draining at a rate of 10% every ten minutes, while luckier customers can only report the same excellent battery life the iPhone 4 was known for.

What the heck is going on? Are some iPhone 4Ses just defective? Will Apple have to initiate a recall?

Thankfully, no. Although no one knows what the problem exactly is, it has at least been proven to be a software problem… not a hardware problem.

Two weeks late, Apple’s match-and-mirror music in the cloud service iTunes Match has finally launched while retaining its beta status. In the meantime, iTunes 10.5.1 for both Windows and Mac has been released, so get downloading if you intend on using iTunes Match.

On Mac, the iTunes 10.5.1 update is 102MB, and is available now on the official iTunes homepage or through Software Update.

iTunes Match is Apple’s much anticipated cloud music service. For $24.99 a year, users can match any of the songs on their hard drive into the cloud to be redownloadable on any iOS or Mac device in 256Kbps AAC CD quality, even if their original track was of much lower quality.

iTunes Match is launching as a beta service. However, for subscribing to iTunes Match Beta, we hear you get 15 months of service instead of just 12. Not a bad deal, but be warned that Apple will delete your iTunes Match library at the end of the beta, meaning you’ll have to go through the matching process all over again.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve found that Apple has been having problems getting iTunes Match’s mirroring service to work reliably. We’ll report back and let you know if they’ve worked out the kinks.

A new Apple patent that details battery and solid state drive configurations for the company’s MacBook Air suggests that future models will boast battery life that significantly exceeds the 7 hours offered by today’s ultraportable.

Despite the talk about Android being available on more handsets, Apple’s short list of iPhones continues to rock the charts. Although fans are always yearning for the next bigthing, nothing illustrates how deep Apple’s bench is than recent figures showing the iPhone 4 and 3GS remain the top-selling smartphones in the United States.

Pugs are the adorable little walleyed goblins of dogs, but through years of selective breeding in the shallower end of the canine gene pool, they aren’t exactly the brightest pups out there.

I guess we shouldn’t feel too betrayed by this cute pug’s lack of taste then. Check out how upset Coco the Pug gets when the latest iPhone 4S commercial pops up during his channel surfing. Check out the video below.