It’s hard to forget the day that Apple surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. But a lot has happened to Apple’s stock since August of 2011. AAPL has ridden a chaotic roller coaster on the stock market. After announcing a record holiday quarter Wednesday with $54.5 billion in revenue and $13.1 billion in profits, AAPL dropped more than 10%. That’s more than $50 billion in market cap gone in a day. Poof.

Apple’s stock isn’t doing so hot, and after over a year in second place, today marks the day that Exxon Mobil dethroned Apple on Wall Street.

And that’s ok. This doesn’t mean that the company is doomed.

This morning we told you about how the iPad 5 will look a lot like an iPad mini with a 10-inch Retina display. iLounge’s report also said that Apple is preparing the rumored less-expensive iPhone to sell in China at a significantly cheaper price.

Now iLounge has shared some additional details regarding the iPhone 5S, namely that one of the next-gen device’s flagship features will be an upgraded camera. Apple’s internal code names for the iPad 5 and second-gen iPad mini have also been revealed.

This is what I wrote earlier this month, strung out on CES and showing it at the edges:

“With irritating regularity, my girlfriend and I dance the same dance. She, or I, go to bed with our iPhones. She, or I, lose it somewhere within the ocean of the bedfolds. She, or I, find ourselves apoplectic. She, or I, demands that the other calls the phone to locate. And then she, or I, realize that we’ve lost our phone too. And then we murder each other into a spattering of bloody chunks in our festering rage, somehow to reconstitute ourselves, temporarily find our iPhones and begin this amphisbaena dance anew.”

The guys behind HipKey, a keychain dongle that can track your iPhone (and vice versa), were paying attention, and so they sent me over a unit for review. I’m not sure it’s revolutionized my life, but it sure has simplified it: now, instead of constantly worrying about misplacing my keys or my iPhone, I only have to worry about misplacing both at the same time.

Weather apps are fairly thick on the ground in the App Store, and iOS even comes with its own Weather app, and has done so since day one. If that’s good enough for you, then keep on enjoying it; there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, if you’re a big fan of apps like Clear, where the interface is simple, minimalist, and just gets out of the way, you’ll love WeatherCube for iPad. It’s a universal app, and chances are you’ll dig it’s clean, functional lines enough to use it often on your iPad 3, 4, or Mini.

Check it out.

We rarely think of frequency spectrums to be a finite resources, but some of the wireless carriers in the U.S. are already bumping into their limits. Spectrum issues can lead to a network slowdown, like the one we saw last summer, and the only way to get more is to buy it.

To beef up their network, AT&T announced today that they have agreed to acquire spectrum in the 700 MHz band from Verizon Wireless. The deal covers 18 states and will cost AT&T $1.9 billion in cash.

By Andy Patrizio

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Agile Partners has a number of Mac and iPad apps but not all of them were on all platforms. Here at the NAMM show, it closed that hole a little with the introduction of AmpKit for the Mac.

AmpKit was an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app that let you connect your guitar through an adapter and it would give the effects and sound quality of various guitar pedals and amplifiers. This allows a guitarist to experiment with different sound pedals and types of amps, since they all have different tones, to find the combination they want.

AmpKit uses two-stage amp modeling, convolution-based cabs and positional mics for the most realistic tone possible on both clean and high-gain settings. It runs in the background so you can play along to other apps, whether it’s a sheet music app or iTunes.

AmpKit is a free download, which comes with the basic configuration of amps and pedals. If you want to increase the library, it will cost you.

Apple’s fifth-generation iPad is expected to finally ditch the existing design and adopt a new form factor that’s said to be much like the iPad mini’s, according to a new report that has surfaced today. A physical model of the device indicates it will be significantly smaller in almost every way, with virtually no bezel down the sides of the display.

As for the iPhone 5S, that’s expected to be very similar to the iPhone 5 — as you may have guessed; while Apple’s new low-cost iPhone, which will reportedly launch some time this year, will be built with China Mobile’s 700 million customers in mind.

Wouldn’t it be neat if you could type “Hey MacBook, STFU!” into your iPhone’s text editor and – mere moments later – have your Mac do just that? Welcome to the nerdy world of automation, where you can remote control not just your computer but your whole home, just using plain text.

With a few simple tools you can control iTunes, turn your bedroom lights down low, and… well, you get the drift. And who said nerds weren’t sexy?

EA’s Origin platform is finally making its way to the Mac, starting with an open alpha release that’s available to download from today. Although it’s open to the public, only “a few thousand users” in North America and the United Kingdom will gain access to it, according to EA — those who get in will be gifted a free copy of Bookworm, a popular word-puzzle game from PopCap.

Earlier this month, Melinda Gates told an interviewer in the U.K. that “of course” her kids asked for iPods for Christmas, but the Gates won’t give their children Apple products because “the wealth from our family came from Microsoft so why would we invest in a competitor?”

This isn’t the first time Melinda Gates has piped up on the subject of giving her children Apple products. Two years ago, Melinda Gates took part in another interview in which she said that she had “gotten [the] argument” that her children should be allowed to have an iPod. She said that her response was to say, “You may have a Zune.”

Today, the FOX Business Network did an interview with Bill Gates, in which he says his children have never asked for an Apple product in their lives. Ever! Someone’s lying.

By Andy Patrizio

One of the first industries to adopt the iPad was the airline industry, because pilots were able to trade their 50 pounds of flight manuals for one iPad that held everything and was rapidly searchable. Musicians are following on that notion, trading in paper sheet music for a 9.7” iPad screen.

Chromatik introduced its eponymous iPad sheet music app that doesn’t just display music, it lets you highlight it, annotate it, make changes and record your own changes. Everything is stored in the cloud, so it can sync with a number of other devices.

Best Buy has slashed $200 off all MacBook Air models and up to $700 off MacBook Pros for its two-day winter sale. You can now get Apple’s 11.6-inch ultraportable for just $799.99, while the discontinued 17-inch MacBook Pro has been reduced from $2,499 to $1,799.99. All machines come with free shipping, but these prices are only valid today and tomorrow.

Archos, maker of dodgy, hard-to-use MP3 players back in the 1990s, is hopping on the Bluetooth keyboard bandwagon.

Its offering is mostly standard, with one (literally) standout feature.

From Saturday, January 26, you’ll have to ask your carrier to unlock your smartphone if you wish to use it on another network. It will become illegal to do so yourself using unauthorized unlocking methods — even if your contract has run its course and you no longer have a commitment with the original provider.

Wow, talk about a stealth release. First released in 1998, Half-Life has never been available on OS X through Steam for Mac, even though every other Valve game — including Half-Life 2 and its episodic sequels — have. Sometime in the last few hours, though, Valve quietly released Half-Life for Mac on Steam… and still hasn’t apparently officially announced it.

By Andy Patrizio

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Guitarists have long had the option of a wallet-sized amp with a headphone plug, so they can plug in their guitar and no one else hears them play. But what if you are stuck on a six-hour plane ride? You can’t take a nail clipper on the plane these days, let alone a guitar.

Well, if the TSA doesn’t confiscate your iPad, yo uczn use MoForte’s Power Chord, an app that turns your tablet into a guitar. All you need to do is strum the screen. You can strum or pick strings, adjust the effects and even shake your iPad like using a whammy bar to channel your inner Hendrix. You can even do string scraping, where you simulate the effect of running a guitar pick down the string for that descending screech sound.

Griffin has finally admitted to itself that no matter how good an iPad or MacBook case it makes, you are – eventually – going to toss it away. So the Paper Nomad is designed to decompose gracefully, kind of like the opposite of every aging Hollywood star, ever.

Google Currents 2.0, the latest edition of Google’s magazine-like news reader, has today arrived on iOS — just over a month after it launched on Android. The update brings a whole host of new features and improvements, including the edition sidebar, fast scan, and breaking stories ranked by Google News.

By Andy Patrizio

ANAHEIM, Calif. – If it’s late January in Anaheim, that means one thing: the North American Music Merchant’s (NAMM) convention turning the area around Disneyland into an even bigger madhouse. NAMM is for musicians what CES is for consumer electronics junkies; just a lot more hair and tattoos. More than 90,000 people will descend on this modestly-sized convention center best suited to hold about 10,000 max.

NAMM has run continuously since 1901, making it one of the oldest trade shows in the country. For the last 35 years it has come to Anaheim and has clearly outgrown the modest convention center, but NAMM is reluctant to leave.

Cyclemeter, long my favorite iPhone app for tracking and recording my rides using GPS, has been updated to support the iPad. This makes it — as far as I know anyway — the only app which will natively turn your iPad mini into a dash-mounted in-flight computer for your bike.

The official YouTube Capture for iPhone and iPod touch has today been updated to introduce support for 1080p video uploading — a feature which many felt should have been included from day one. Prior to this update, which also promises improvements to audio sync and upload speeds, users were limited to uploads in 720p resolution.

Samsung has today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, which slightly exceed the estimations that were set by the Korean company earlier this month. It recorded an operating profit of 8.84 trillion won (approx. $8.27 billion) during the three-month period, on 56.06 trillion won (approx. $54.45 billion) in revenue. That’s a 10% increase in profit over the previous quarter, and a whopping 89.3% increase in profit over the fourth quarter of 2011.

We showed you a handful of fantastic, instant keyboard shortcuts to shut down, reboot, or sleep your Mac, but an even safer way is to bring up the Power button dialog box that happens when you hit the, well, Power button on your Mac. That’s the one in the upper right corner of the keyboard on most modern Macs, while some older Macs have it as a separate button integrated into the body of the Mac itself.

Either way, hit that Power button and then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts to activate the different options in the dialog.

You should probably check if your cash is still in your wallet… ’cause according to Apple’s recent earnings call, they just made all the money. We put some perspective on just how huge Apple’s Q1 cash hoard was on our all-new CultCast, then expertly deconstruct Tim Cook’s cryptic words about new and unannounced products.

But wait, there’s more! From iOS 7, to bigger-screen iPhones, to our favorite Mac apps, we answer your Facebook questions in our newest segment, CultCast Q&A.

Get a fun weekly dose of all things Apple! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Vine is a new, free toy from Twitter. It replaces text with video, but only six seconds of it at a time, shot instant-by-instant. And it’s much cooler than I expected it to be.