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The hate-mongers of the Westboro Church are out with their profane placards in Cupertino today, as we said they would be.

Right now, they’re outside Cupertino High School, where Justin Li snapped this pic of a counter protester dressed in all black (is that a Jobsian turtleneck?) and sneakers with a sign making a mockery of the church member’s display.

Later, Westboro has said it will try to ruin the Steve Jobs memorial service by brandishing the same trademark awfulness outside Apple headquarters in Cupertino.

But Apple fans are on the case. As you can see in the picture above, Apple fans are uniting to counter-protest Westboro’s homophobic, hate-filled picketing.

Everyone’s favorite torrent client for the Mac just got an awesome update. In addition to a number of new features on the Mac, BitTorrent has launched a fantastic HTML5 version of µTorrent for the iPad that makes managing your µTorrent downloads a breeze while you’re away from your computer.

Siri is one of the iPhone 4S’ biggest selling points, and I think anyone who’s had chance to try out the feature would agree that’s it’s pretty exceptional. For the time being, it’s exclusive to Apple’s latest iPhone, but one hacker claims to have it running on any device running iOS 5, and says a jailbroken device is not necessary.

Wow, big news! The iPhone 4S is officially coming to a fourth American network in the coming weeks!

Bad news for the millions of T-Mobile customers using their jailbroken iPhones on the fourth-largest American wireless network, though: the iPhone 4S is coming to a network you’ve probably never heard of.

The day after Apple wows Wall Street with over-the-top quarterly revenue numbers is often followed by reports bloggers beat the pants off professional prognosticators. Not this time. The usually-bullish bloggers took a dive, missing Apple’s fourth quarter financials by an average of 23 percent.

It’s always said that Steve Jobs lived and breathed for Apple, up until the very day he died, but it’s easy to discount how literally true that seemingly trite adage actually was. A new anecdote from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son puts Steve’s dedication to his company in stark relief, proving that Jobs was working on Apple’s next product up until the day before he died.

If you told me that our Cult of Mac tee was offensive and then slapped me with your leather glove, I’d politely say “Madam, for the record, it stands for Mac I’d Like to friend!” I’d still dual you though…

In any case, we’re getting awfully low on these beauties, and once we sell out, we’ll most likely be out for good.

These fine unisex tees are 100% made in the beautiful USA, are sold by Seattle indie brand Might Tees, and are available to ship anywhere in the world.

You can get one now for just $23 $18.

A day after Apple failed to beat Wall Street revenue expectations for the first time since 2002, analysts are trying to explain what happened. The potential culprits range from iPhone 5 rumors to the tech giant just needed a breather.

If you’ve already updated to iOS 5, I’m sure one of the features you’re enjoying most is the new Notification Center. It’s a fantastic addition to iOS, and something we were begging for from Apple for some time. However, there are a number of ways in which Notification Center can be improved… and one of them is to install IntelliScreenX.

Before the iPhone came along in 2007 and changed the way in which we use mobile devices, touchscreen smartphones were very different to what we have today. They were big, clunky and slow; it was hard to find and install applications for them; and every one of them came with a damn stylus that was either lost or broken within the first six months.

Things are completely different now, though, thanks to Apple’s smartphone. But it took a long time for us to get here. This awesome video from CNET UK offers an animated journey through the history of the iPhone and how Apple’s revolutionary device was born.

Apple has updated its website this morning introduce a ‘Remembering Steve‘ page which shares a selection of tributes left by Apple fans from all over the world since Steve passed away on October 5.

As Apple’s stores nationwide prepare to close for a few hours on Wednesday to remember Steve Jobs, many are removing the memorials that sprang up on their windows and doorsteps. The memorial at Apple’s flagship store in San Francisco, for example, was removed last week.

Not so the Apple store in Palo Alto, Calif. — Steve’s hometown. Quite the opposite, the number of Post-It tributes has grown to the point that both windows are now almost completely covered. The picture above was snapped just a few hours ago on Tuesday evening.

It’s a nice tribute. Let’s hope they stay up for a while longer. Here are a few more pictures:

Let’s just say it: any smartphone that recognizes my lineage by calling me a queen is right as rain in my book. (Namely because it saves those tiring discussions about “You don’t know who you’re dealing with!” etc.)

The learning curve with Apple’s new iPhone 4S voice activated personal assistant Siri may or may not be steep – depending on your point of view – but a  Twitter feed launched Oct. 15 compiling the more unusual responses is exceedingly droll. 

Since we posted about AirBeam’s free giveaway (it’s usually $4), developer Heiko Straulino has been busy improving his powerful iDevice surveillance app — and the newest update, released over the weekend, now let’s users stream and record audio as well, and adds an audio detection feature similar in function to motion detection.

During today’s fourth fiscal quarterly earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the massive pile of cash that Apple has in the bank. As it turns out, about two-thirds of Apple’s available cash is currently held overseas.

Apple is known for being incredible conservative when it comes to spending. The company very rarely makes high-profile buyouts, and internal operations are streamlined for efficiency. Holding money offshore allows Apple to defer taxes until the money is brought back to the United States.

During today’s Q4 earnings call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer talked about how “pervasive” iPhone rumors hurt Apple’s fiscal business. While nearly every product saw a significant increase in sales for the fourth fiscal quarter, the iPhone saw a lackluster 17.07 million iPhones sold. That’s 21% year over year growth. The iPad saw 166% year over year growth.

It’s typical for product sales to taper off right before a refresh, but this last fiscal quarter’s iPhone sales were even lower than what Apple expected. Oppenheimer blamed the rumor mill for hurting Apple’s fiscal business with regards to the iPhone.

To honor Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Apple retail stores around the U.S. will close for around 90 minutes on Wednesday, October 19.

From 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. (PST) tomorrow, Apple’s iconic stores will be shuttered so employees can take part in a memorial service for Jobs. They’ll watching a live broadcast of the event being held at an outdoor amphitheater at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. Apple employees outside the U.S. will be able to view a re-broadcast of the celebration.

Reuters reports that in preparation for the closure, stores across California aren’t accepting online bookings for Wednesday morning, either for tech-support or tutorials.

Via Reuters

Apple today announced its most recent quarterly earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter. Despite missing Wall Street projections for the first time since 2002, Apple saw incredible growth in multiple areas, including record-breaking sales for the Mac.

760,000 more Macs were sold than any other previous quarter. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that sales were largely fueled by MacBook Air and MacBook Pro sales, with growth in Asia also contributing to the Mac’s continued success.

There were rumors flying around months ago that Apple was looking to buy Dropbox. The popular cloud storage service has made a name for itself as one of the most relied-upon wireless sync solutions in the consumer market.

The rumors were true. Apple did want to buy Dropbox, so much so that Steve Jobs himself offered the startup a nine-digit acquisition offer. Dropbox said no to the offer, so Apple created iCloud.

Apple today announced its earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter, with $28.27 billion in revenue and $6.62 billion in profit. In Q4, Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones, 11.12 million iPads, and 4.89 million Macs.

This is the first time in years that Apple has missed its Wall Street predictions. However, Apple surpassed its own estimates of $25 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter.

Want to see just how good the iPhone 4S is as a video camera? Yeah, so did this guy. So he made a side-by-side comparison – and the results show the 4S is a pretty impressive piece of video recording kit.

Here’s a new exercise workout tip courtesy of Motorola: next time you’re considering buying that 8,000 calorie heart attack on a bun, instead layout your cash on an iPod Nano clone that costs $100 more than the real thing. You’ll surely work up a sweat kicking yourself for buying that new MotoACTV watch.

It never ceases to amaze me about what people will do to get your attention so today’s video tidbit shouldn’t be much of a surprise. After all we’ve seen MacBooks, iPhones and iPads go through all kinds of hell on the wrong end of a gun and even a PT Cruiser.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that someone has taken the iPhone 4S and shot it with a .50 caliber incendiary round. He even goes so far as to ask Siri if it is bullet proof. See how Siri replied and how well the iPhone 4S did or not after the break.

Color Uncovered is a neat little educational app for kids and grown-ups, all about the weird and mysterious science of color.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs passed away before the hugely successful launch of the iPhone 4S last Friday, but we’re certain he had lots of time to play around with it while it was in testing at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. If you’d like to use your shiny new device to pay your respects to its creator, these Steve tribute cases that were found in Thailand should do the trick.