Despite countless rumors suggesting it was on its way, when Microsoft unveiled its new Surface tablet late last week, a lot of people were surprised. It was a strange move by the Redmond-based company, who has traditionally focused solely on software and allowed other companies to worry about the hardware.

So why did Microsoft build its own tablet?

According to one of the company’s former employees, it took hardware matters into its own hands when it realized it couldn’t rely on PC makers to make the same bets Apple was making. You see, Apple has taken some incredible steps to make its iPad the behemoth it is today. And rival companies just weren’t willing to gamble.

Over the weekend, The NY Times posted another investigative piece in its iEconomy series that about Apple. This installment focused on Apple’s retail stores. As with previous articles in the series, this one focuses on legitimate concerns about the American economy in an age of globalization. Like the other pieces, this one targets Apple specifically and ignores the range of Apple competitors that employ similar practices.

The primary issue that the Times brings up with regard to Apple retail stores is that employees can sell thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of Apple products and still earn a relatively modest wage. The underlying sentiment is that if a retail employee sells so much hardware, he should earn more because he is contributing to Apple’s vast revenues.

The only way for things to shake out that way and remain fair would be if Apple offered performance-based awards or commissions. Apple chose not to do that because doing so would have delivered a fundamentally different customer experience than the one envisioned by Steve Jobs – a fact that the NY Times chose not to explore in any real depth.

It seems that there can be no corner of the niche product universe that can’t be mined and exploited with tasteless “luxury” versions of regular, plain ol’ tools. Today’s example: the Lynktec ArtCloths, which show your “appreciation” for great art in the same way that the tinny ringtone snippet belching from your cellphone shows your appreciation of music.

Although iOS 6 looks a lot like iOS 5 on the surface, a number of Apple’s built-in apps and services have received some big changes. The biggest overhaul comes to the Maps app, which has done away with Google Maps in favor of Apple’s own 3D mapping service. Another feature you can look forward to in Maps, according to an Apple document sent out to developers, is Yelp check-ins.

There’s making things out of Lego, and then there’s making things out of Lego. And H.Y. Leung’s amazing white Leica M8 is firmly in the latter camp. His replica rangefinder might just be the best Lego fake we’ve ever seen (outside of anything to do with Star Wars, of course).

Recent keyboards for both desktop and laptop versions of Macintosh computers come with media buttons across the top of the keyboard where the F keys are. For example, my 11″ Macbook Air has F1 and F2 assigned to brightness, and F11 and F12 assigned to volume. When pressed, they increase or decrease the volume or the brightness one little tick mark at a time. But what if you want finer control?

Any Apple fan would love to know what goes on behind the scenes at their local Apple store, but unfortunately the company’s obsession with secrecy means the only way to do that is to get a job there. It seems like a great place to work; after all, who wouldn’t want to play with Apple devices all day and then tell people why they’re so great?

But did you know that on their days off, every Apple staffer has to workout rigorously to ensure they are strong enough to carry the store’s cash from the tills to the vault? This is just one of the secret rules every retail employee must follow each day. Thanks to the Joy of Tech, we can take a glimpse at some more of them.

Rumors suggesting a new Apple retail store is coming to Sydney, Australia, have been circulating for some time now, but the Cupertino company has been keeping any plans close to its chest. It seems, however, that someone forgot to tell Siri to keep quiet.

The voice-controlled assistant has revealed Apple’s plans for a new store in the Broadway shopping center.

When connected to a Wi-Fi network, Tweetbot’s terrific streaming feature continually delivers new tweets to your timeline without the need to refresh manually. But did you know that the app contains a “Super Secret Settings” menu that allows you to activate streaming over a 2G or 3G cellular connection?

Here’s how to access it.

Home movies rock, right? What better way to entertain the family than with moving pictures starring the kids at the beach, weird Uncle William putting carrots up his nose, and the four hundredth video walkthrough of your favorite amusement park. In the past, viewers of these home movies had to sit through hours of badly shot footage and horribly raw video and film of all sorts of activities. These days, however, Apple has saved us all with the creation of one of the best darn video editing packages for the average consumer, iMovie. With iMovie ’11, the development team has refined things to a high sheen, helping us all make short work of some fairly professional and complicated video editing activities.

To make things even easier, we’ve put together a list of tips, tricks, and tweaks to help you get the best out of iMovie, the video editing app for the rest of us.

Some iOS developers are noticing a change for the better in their app store search results, and it may in fact be due to Chomp, the app search company that made headlines this past February when it was announced that Apple had acquired it.

Yeah it’s the set of apps we love to hate—Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. I know, it’s all be downhill since Word 6.0, but still MS Office is the standard for sending and receiving files. Myself, I’ve always liked Excel and I taught myself how to use Pivot Tables, but it wasn’t fun or easy. When I told other people “Oh, just use a Pivot Table and you can do all of that…” their response was “That’s too hard to learn, I’ll do it the way I’ve been doing it…”

Wow.

So how would you like to tap into all the features of MS Office 2011? Really learn it inside and out? Now you can with today’s deal—Microsoft Office for Mac Video Training Bundle for only $79! That’s almost a 60% discount off the usual $196!

While other manufacturers might tart up their headphones with loud colors, obnoxious logos and frills, the Klipsch Image One ($150) drops all extraneous nonsense in favor of making you happy through its three impressive strengths: perfomance, comfort and portability — a triple threat that makes these headphones a contender for best traveling companion.

Let’s look at a few facts.

Apple Retail stores were the number one retailer last year, taking in more money per square foot than any other US retailer, including number two Tiffany, which made a bit more than half of that. Sounds good, right? Then take a look at what a retail employee, Jordan Golson, has to say.

“I was earning $11.25 an hour,” he said. “Part of me was thinking, ‘This is great. I’m an Apple fan, the store is doing really well.’ But when you look at the amount of money the company is making and then you look at your paycheck, it’s kind of tough.”

The disconnect between the incredible success of the corporation and the relatively low-end pay scale of its retail employees, as well as the reasons those retail employees continue to work for Apple, is the subject of a report in the New York Times today.

Did you enter the Snapheal iPad giveaway? Mike first posted about it a month ago and the response has been nothing short of tremendous, but all good things must come to an end. People have been winning SnapHeal every week (I got a copy and it is bring amazing) and now it’s coming up to the big draw for the iPad. So…

There is only one day left to enter the contest!

So get to it and enter!—Snapheal New iPad Giveaway – iPhone Hacks Deals

It’s our inalienable right as citizens of the modern world to take a vacation or a holiday, right? Well, instead of packing your whole family off to an all-inclusive Club Med vacation or Disney cruise, how about taking on one of the most time-honored summer vacation traditions, the road-trip. Long drives through scenic countryside with loving families and family pets are some of the best memories we all have, right? Right?

Well, at least we have iOS devices with us these days to both combat boredom and make sure we arrive where we want to. Here’s a veritable cornucopia of apps and ideas for road-tripping this summer, iOS-style.

You’ve heard the predictions. We’re quickly slouching toward a world in which your every move, every purchase, every act of “content consumption” will be meticulously and automatically monitored, tracked and captured. Algorithms will constantly profile you so advertisers can make their advertising specific to your location, preferences, personality, social group, income and education level and more.

Facebook’s future depends on this idea. This is one reason why Google launched Google+. This is why Microsoft launched Bing. This is why investors are bullish on location-based services like Foursquare. This is why Amazon.com created its own web browser.

Every major technology company, it seems, is scrambling to get into the user-data harvesting racket.

Everyone except Apple.

Why didn’t Apple buy Facebook or Twitter? Why didn’t Apple launch its own social network? What is Apple’s strategy for harvesting data about users?

I’ve been puzzled by these questions, and wondering out loud on this site exactly when and how Apple would reveal its strategy for competing on the personal-data collection battlefield.

But this week, something shocking happened that made me think: Maybe Apple isn’t going to get into the data-harvesting business at all. Maybe Apple is going to fight it!

Redditor saintt today posted a photo of one of the lowest-rent iPod mods that we’ve ever seen.

Dubbed by his co-workers as an “iHat,” this traffic cone-shaped monstrosity contained one song, and one song only.

A US judge today set a trial date for the US government’s lawsuit that accuses Apple and book publishers of conspiracy to fix the price of e-books. The case will begin June 3, 2013 and is based in part on antitrust charges, with the US Justice Department claiming that Apple colluded with five book publishers to artificially inflate electronic book prices in early 2010, when Apple was releasing the iPad.

You know what it takes to step up your game on your Mac? Apps. Great apps. This isn’t really news to you, is it? And one of the reasons that Cult of Mac brings you deals is so you can get a great deal on a great app. Recently we’ve had great-app-one-offs, you know one great app at one great price. Today we’re bringing you a slew of great apps at a fantastic price.

The Mac Productivity Bundle comes with 7 apps, two sets of icons & graphics, 6 ebooks on web development, and 4 WordPress themes for $50. I’ll understand if you don’t finish reading and go buy it.

Last chance! Deal ending soon!

In a post on the official Google Mac blog today, editor Scott Knaster wrote a final piece that closed the Mac-centric web log for good. Citing the current mainstream popularity of Apple, Macintosh computers, and of course the iPad, iPhone and iOS, Knaster says that he realizes that a special Mac blog is no longer needed.

When you think of calculator apps, great innovations don’t usually come to mind. Most calculators function the same way, by punching in numbers on little keys. Rechner Calculator (Rechner meaning calculator in German) hopes to change that. This new application, available for $0.99 on the App Store, is the first of its kind to use gestures for operation.

Despite its continuing downward spiral, many IT professionals continue to acknowledge that RIM’s BlackBerry platform — or more accurately its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) — remains the most secure mobile platform on the market. That’s a fact RIM hypes every chance it gets. Usually RIM points out that BES supports over 500 security and management policies. That’s roughly ten times the number of discrete management options that Apple has built into iOS.

While that number sounds impressive, the real difference between BlackBerry management and iOS management isn’t really about the number of policies. In many ways, it isn’t even about what IT can or can’t manage. The real difference is a cultural divide in the way mobile devices and mobile management is perceived.

Rumors about a possible Retina display iMac have been floating around almost as long as the Retina display itself. From the time the iPhone 4 was introduced, people began speculating that Apple’s Mac line would eventually receive a display upgrade as well. Now that this rumor has come to fruition in the case of the new MacBook Pro, it would only make sense for these new displays to trickle down to all of Apple’s other computers.

Word is now spreading that this might not be the case, though. We may have to wait a little while longer for an iMac with a Retina display.

The Notes app bundled with the iPhone is great for quick little notes, but it hasn’t really changed since the original iPhone, and offers very few options other than a selection of three fonts. For those that want an app more powerful than Notes, but not as advanced as something like Pages for the iPhone, Just Type by Shubham Kedia might just be the perfect notes app.