The Geniuses at your local Apple Store are used to dealing with a wide assortment of complaints and problems. Broken harddrive, cracked iPhone screen, kidnapped woman? They can handle it all.

A few nights ago a kidnapped woman from Kentucky was forced to walk into an Apple store with her kidnapper who was trying to force her to purchase a bunch of Apple products with her credit cards. But thanks to an alert Apple Store employee, the woman was rescued and her kidnapper is now in the slammer.

Kodak is on the verge of bankruptcy, but in a final bid to raise some cash, the company is selling off its entire patent portfolio. The company believes it could fetch upwards of $2.6 billion, and Apple and Google are going head to head for them. However, neither company has submitted a bid anywhere near Kodak’s estimate.

A day after we started our campaign to turn him into an Internet meme, it seems like Apple is starting to be embarassed about their new Mac Guy ads. They’ve stopped airing the series of ads during Olympic television broadcasts.

Apple’s iPhone is so successful that the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, recently revealed that “each new generation sold approximately equal to all previous generations combined.” That’s pretty staggering when you think about it, and according to analyst firm Asymco, it could mean that Apple’s new iPhone will sell more than 263 million units.

Apple’s wireless accessories are great at conserving battery life… so great, in fact, that when they suddenly run out of juice, it can be a shock to the system, since you never knew they were hard up for electricity to begin with.

On a Mac, it’s fairly complicated to see battery life on your connected devices through System Preferences, but wouldn’t it be great if you could check them out in your menu bar, just like your Mac’s remaining battery life? Thanks to Battery Status, you can.

Remember Fluent? It was a webmail service which made your Gmail look like now-defunct iOS and Mac app Sparrow.

Now, like Sparrow (and the similar-looking Tweetie before it), Fluent is dead.

It’s likely to be at least a month before Apple releases iOS 6 to the public, and so it’s unlikely apps will receive iOS 6 support for a few weeks yet. But Spotify is getting its update out of the way early. Its latest iOS release — version 0.5.4 — brings iOS 6 support, more radio stations on the iPad, and bug fixes.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned blogging about Apple, it’s that the company doesn’t stand for copycats — especially when those copycats go after patents that Steve Jobs was particularly proud of. That’s what Samsung did when it copied Apple’s inertial scrolling feature, right after Jobs told them not to.

Are you an early adopter? So asks Beau Gunderson at Idego, via his Singly-powered nerd-boasting engine. Tap in your details and you will be told just how early you signed up for Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter and Gmail.

And if you were quick enough to get in before you were forced into a username like charliesorrel6969_solastyear, you might even want to grab the little widget to embed into whatever site you choose and show off your alpha-geek status.

Have you tried to get rid of an application or document from the Dock after an upgrade to Mountain Lion? Before now, it was a simple drag and release: click on the offending icon, drag it away from the Dock, and let go. The little “poof” cloud would appear and the icon would be gone from the Dock. New OS X users would freak out, crying, “You got rid of my app!” and I would laugh. Also, I would show them where the actual app was, and how to put the icon back in the Dock, as the icon is simply a pointer to the real app. But I digress.

In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, this doesn’t work in quite the same way anymore. Try to click, drag, and release just ends up with the icon speeding back to its previous place in the Dock. You want to get rid of it? You have to learn a new, subtly different behavior.

Sprint has a warehouse full of iPhone 4S units it needs to shift before Apple announces the new iPhone in September, which is great news for consumers. If you don’t plan on picking up the sixth-generation device later this year, you can now grab its predecessor for just $149 with a two-year contract. And if you buy online, Sprint will waive the $36 activation fee, too.

Apple wants Samsung to stump up a whopping $2.5 billion in damages for allegedly copying its iOS devices, but how much does Apple feel it is owed specifically for each device? A new court filing entitled “Summary of Apple’s Damages Calculations” provides a complete breakdown of the damages, and shows exactly which of Samsung’s Galaxy devices are accused of infringing Apple’s patents, and what the Cupertino company is demanding in damages for each one.

Last week, Wired columnist Mat Honan’s digital life was destroyed by hackers who were able to connect to his Apple ID and remotely erase all of the data on his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

Apple responded today to Honan via a spokesperson, Natalie Kerris. In a statement to Wired, where Honan posted an account of his experiences, Apple promised to look into how users can protect their data and security better when they need to reset their account passwords.

An internal Samsung email was submitted today into evidence in the Apple vs. Samsung case being heard in Northern California. In the correspondance, head of mobile communications for Samsung JK Shin praises the iPhone, and describes the difference between his own company’s user experience and that of the iPhone as “the difference between heaven and earth.”

It’s fairly rough evidence for the Korean electronics maker, who had tried to keep the document out of the trial until a misstep today by Samsung legal counsel John Quinn, who mentioned the phrase “crisis of design” from the email, allowed it to be admitted.

While Apple and Samsung duke it out in Northern California this week, it makes sense to take a little time comparing the two on sales numbers, units shipped, and profit made. And while many folks these days like to bring up the fact that more Samsung devices are sold than iOS devices, those same folks are missing the boat.

According to a report from Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt, via website AllThingsD, Apple’s iOS devices are making its company a ton more profit than Samsung’s devices are. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Keeping up with all the latest Apple vs Samsung happenings can be tough, and confusing. The trials is underway in San Jose California. Some days are filled with interesting witnesses taking the stand, while others are packed with lawyers hammering boring witnesses with silly questions.

To help you keep up on the Apple vs Samsung trial we’ve compiled the entire day’s events into one short news story that consists of the best tweets from the reporters there on the scene. Here’s everything you need to about what happened in the Apple vs Samsung Trial on day four, August 6th.

Here’s an interesting little factoid for you. The Curiosity rover — which landed last night on Mars, remote controlled by a team of NASA scientists armed with MacBook Pros — runs on a RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer.

This computer, in turn, is based on the IBM PowerPC 750 CPU, which Intel first introduce on November 10, 1997. This CPU was used by Apple in many computers in the late 1990s, including the original iMac.

As one insightful redditor notes: “Curiosity is essentially a 2-CPU Power Macintosh G3 with some nifty peripherals and one HELL of a UPS.”

Source: Reddit

Apple unleashed iOS 6 beta 4 this afternoon with several minor changes and the glaring omission of the stock YouTube app. iOS 6 is expected to make its public debut this fall alongside the next iPhone, but for now the software is entrusted to the hands of the developer community.

Those who know what they’re doing will be pleased to know that iOS 6 beta 4 can be jailbroken with the current version of the popular RedSn0w tool.

Apple’s iAd network hasn’t really caught on as fast as the Cupertino-based company would have liked, but that doesn’t mean iAds aren’t creating great results for the companies who have hopped on board. In a new video profile on its iAd Network portal, Apple shows how iAd has helped Land Rover raise awareness for its Range Rover Evoque automobile.

Registration is now open for MacTech Conference 2012. The annual conference, which is a great learning and networking experience for IT professionals and developers, will be held October 17 – 19 in Los Angeles. A pre-registration discount is available for anyone who registers by the end of August.

The conference is sponsored by MacTech magazine and was launched in 2010, the year that Apple chose to focus its annual Worldwide Developers Conference solely on iOS. Since then, the conference has grown into a major event for IT professionals that need to support Macs and/or iOS devices in business, enterprise, and education environments. The conference has also become a serious event for Mac and iOS developers.

When the iPhone first came out I remember using the YouTube app almost everyday for the first couple of months. It was amazing to be able to stream videos anywhere I had service, even if it took forever for them to buffer. It was magic. I couldn’t get enough. And then I stopped using it.

Now the YouTube app feels like a clunky old dinasaur. I get annoyed when a link opens a YouTube video up in the app rather than the web browser, and I hide the app in my “Apps I Wish I Could Just Delete” folder, along with Stocks, NewStand, and a few others.

Do you ever use the YouTube app? Why or why not?

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac forums and tell us what you think of the YouTube app.

The reason the software keyboard works so well in iOS has a lot to do with Autocorrect and its pretty spot-on ability to figure out what the heck we’re typing. Most of the time, anyway, as various parody sites on the internet will attest to.

Autocorrect also learns the words you use more frequently, and adds them to a list in the background, letting you use oddly spelled terminology more easily. Sometimes, though, this functionality can backfire, as you end up adding words and phrases you really don’t want to have things autocorrect to.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this one.

Along with the removal of YouTube as a default app, one of the new features of iOS 6 beta 4 is the ability to share data via Bluetooth. It’s not exactly clear what kind of purpose Bluetooth Sharing will serve.

It might be linked to the iPod Nano as a watch where users will be able to view text messages, weather, answer calls, and more by tapping on their iPod Nano when the latest version is released.

Me, I like a tidy Desktop. Sure I save things to the Desktop (like the images I use for these posts), but once a week or so I clean house, deleting almost everything from my Desktop. Now my buddies AJ and Shane, well they have Desktops that make my eyes bleed. Files and folders everywhere. I’m seriously thinking I should buy them each a copy of DesktopShelves. It’s not going to be a big deal either because, it’s our first $5 Friday!

DesktopShelves does one simple thing. You create “shelves” (they look like shelves you have on your wall) to hold files and folders on your Desktop. It’s a virtual thing, really, everything is still in a folder in the Finder, but it looks better. Check out the movie after the jump.

Apple just released iOS 6 beta 4 to developers. So far it looks like there are a few small bug fixes and performance enhancements except for one unexpected surprise – Apple has removed the YouTube app from the iPhone and iPad.

It’s no secret that Apple has been trying to remove Google’s app from iOS and replace them with better alternatives. Some might think YouTube’s removal isan act of war, but we think it’s just as likely that Apple removed YouTube as a default app just because of plain obsolescence.