The U.S. Air Force has been awarded a $9.36 million to buy up to 18,000 iPads. They will be used for navigation and as digital flight manuals.

It’s one of the military’s largest orders of tablets.

Did you know Cult of Mac has a brand new podcast? No lies! We’re calling it The CultCast, and it’s the best 30 minute conversation you’ll hear about Apple all week long.

And wouldn’t you know it, we just released episode two into the wild! Join Leander Kahney, Buster Heine, and me, Erfon Elijah, as we yay and nay our way though all the iPad 3 rumors you’ve been hearing; ponder how Apple’s stock price could make it to $1000 per share; and argue about whether AT&T should be allowed to throttle those of us with unlimited iPhone data plans.

Sound tasty? Well dig in my friend! You can subscribe to The CultCast right now in iTunes and listen to episode two on your way to work!

Want an iPad 3?

Tim Cook will be introducing it next week. Take our reader survey and you’ll be entered into a sweepstakes to win one.

We’ve grown a tremendous amount these last three years, from just a few thousand pageviews a month to more than 9 million in February — and that was a short month. We need a favor — some data about you, the readers, to help attract advertisers and sponsorship partners. This is crucial — our bandwidth costs are through the roof!

There’s more. We’d like to learn something about the state of the Apple ecosystem — what devices you are using and how. Do you use your iPad at work? What are you planning to buy this year? We’d also like to learn what you think of the site and what we could do better.

Apple’s App Store just hit 25 billion app downloads. The countdown just clicked over at about 9.45PM PST. Apple has promised a $10,000 gift card to the person who downloaded the 25,000,000,000 billionth app. The winner will be notified shortly and revealed on the countdown’s web page.

The countdown began on February 17th and proceeded at an estimated rate of 49 million app downloads a day. It took the wildly popular App Store just four years to reach the 25 billion download mark. By contrast, it took eight-and-half years for 16 billion songs to be downloaded from the iTunes Store. For more insights into key Apple milestones, check out the latest on apple news today.

Here’s a video of Apple’s 25 billion countdown timer clicking over:

We all can’t wait to get our hands on a Retina display-equipped iPad in the coming weeks, and many developers are starting to get their current iPad apps ready for the rumored 2048×1536 resolution.

One developer in particular decided to share and compare Retina display screenshots of his iPad game. The differences between the new and current resolution are pretty stunning.

If you’ve been thinking there’s a chance the next-gen iPad will be more expensive than the entry $500 price of the current iPad 2, don’t sweat it any longer. According to a new report, pricing for the iPad 3 will remain the same. The offered storage capacities will also not change. 

The only problem with Instagram is that all the photos I’ve taken of the delicious lunches I’ve eaten are all stored in “the cloud”, which means I don’t have any physical evidence to support my wild stories of debauchery. Those faux-vintage snapshots I’ve taken with friends need to be preserved in an analog format, and with a little bit of funding, Instaprint is hoping to ease all my worries.

TidyTilt is a nifty earbud cord wrap, multi-position kickstand and mount for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that looks a lot like Apple’s iPad Smartcover.

The brainchild of Zahra Tashakorinia and Derek Tarnow, students at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, TidyTilt was so popular that its massive overfunding on Kickstarter turned their little project into a business.

Meet the G4 Apple //c. The coolest freaking Apple mod I’ve ever seen.  This little puppy is a gorgeous Frankintosh project that houses a G4 Mac Mini in the case of an Apple //c. On the outside, the Apple //c hasn’t lost any of it’s retro charms. It’s like the ghost of Steve Jobs transported this cute little guy through time in almost perfect condition and decided to give him an update while he was at it.

The machine, keyboard, and mouse are all fully functional. Inside, the G4 Apple //c is rocking a 1.4GHz G4 with a gig of RAM, which is an insane upgrade from the 1MHz 65C02 and 128k of RAM it was cruising around with back in 1984.

We decided to visit the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to get a peek at the signage Apple is currently putting up for its iPad event next week. The colorful look and feel reminds us of the original iPad launch back in 2010.

Yesterday we showed you how to make your own gorgeous pixel art with The Grix. Today we’re looking at pixels again, this time with a clever new photo toy for iOS called pxl, by Rainer Kohlberger.

Apple has started preparing the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California for its iPad 3 announcement on Wednesday, March 7th at 10 AM PDT. As always, workers have started hanging signage for the media event.

Apple said today that it is responsible for creating 514,000 jobs in the U.S. alone. Citing retail, customer support, transportation, healthcare, corporate, manufacturing, and developer jobs that have all been created “through innovation,” Apple claims responsibly for over a half million jobs spanning across 50 states.

Today would have been Theodor Seuss Geisel’s 108th birthday. Of course we know him as Dr. Seuss, one of the most revered children’s book authors of all time. Many people and organizations will be celebrating his works today and even Hollywood is doing its part by bringing the classic Thorax (auto-correct fail) The Lorax to life in an amazing looking 3-D CGI film (in theaters today). While his books have entertained and educated children for generations, recent technology has breathed new life into his classics via digital interactive children’s books. Oceanhouse Media, a leader in DICBs, has also joined the celebration by discounting their Dr. Seuss apps on both Android and iOS.

The iPhone and iPad have been core players in the so-called consumerization of IT. This trend that is transforming whole industries is both a challenge and an opportunity for IT professionals, managers, and individuals in just about every field out there.

The first ever Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) conference and expo as it kicks off this weekend in San Francisco. The conference is a unique opportunity to hear from IT and business leaders from every industry was well as vendors, experts, and end users that have jumped in and seized the reins of this new workplace phenomenon. On tap will be stories about innovation, case studies in successful mobile initiatives, and much more.

Have Apple employees already loaded up iOS 6 on the unreleased iPad 3? Apple certainly tests protypes and beta software well before unveiling it to the public and it looks like Apple is currently testing iOS 6 on the new iPad 3.

Apple is set to open its first retail store in The Netherlands tomorrow, and it looks gorgeous. Located in the historic Hirsch building, the museum-like store features ornate, regal architecture and a beautiful glass staircase.

Photographer Thomas Schlijper has posted several images from inside the new Amsterdam store.

The Champs-Élysées in Paris is the Mecca of shopping in France. Its swanky shops, cinemas, and cafés, ooze with exuberant fashions that appear far more sophisticated than any European counterpart. It’s the perfect place for a Mega-Apple Store, and if rumors are to be believed, Apple may be planning to move in pretty soon.

Many pundits have made the argument that the iPad’s days in the business and corporate world will be numbered once Microsoft releases Windows 8 and Windows on ARM (WOA) tablets later this year. The biggest rationale behind this argument is that corporate IT departments will feel much more comfortable deploying and managing Windows devices and that they will already have the skills, tools,  and resources needed to setup, secure, and roll out Windows-powered iPad competitors.

That argument lost a lot of credibility this week when Microsoft acknowledged that WOA tablets cannot be managed like other Windows variants including Windows 8 on PCs and x86 tablets or PCs running Windows 7, Vista, or XP. This makes the iPad much more suited for business than Windows on ARM devices.

iPad 3 talk has reached a fever pitch leading up to Apple’s announcement on Wednesday, but have we all been calling the device by the wrong name? Some people seem to think so.

Apple could very well call the third-generation iPad the “iPad HD.” The device is expected to sport a super hi-res Retina display and feature faster internals. It certainly wouldn’t be out of place for Apple to change it up and break the traditional naming convention, or would it?

Germany has become quite the hotbed for patent lawsuits lately as it’s been in the spotlight for the Apple vs Motorola Mobility legal battle. As the legal war rages on, a new ruling has found that Motorola did indeed violate Apple’s EU Patent No. EP2059868 on a “portable electronic device for photo management”. The patent in question basically fixes over scrolling by bouncing the user back a bit once they’ve zoomed in too far, and even though this patent is software specific, it may have repercussions on Motorola’s hardware if they don’t come up with a fix quickly.

Unlike most computers, the iPad isn’t designed to be a multi-user device. iOS doesn’t support multiple user accounts or profiles – that essentially means one set of device and application settings along with a personal collection of information like notes, email, browser bookmarks, and stored passwords for different online services. Sharing a device with that much personal data makes it easy for someone to snoop while using another person’s iPhone or iPad or on an iPad that is commonly shared between multiple users.

Passtouch is a web browser for the iPad that’s designed to offer at least some multi-user capabilities as well as to secure web-based information like bookmarks, cookies, and stored passwords. It doesn’t offer whole-device accounts or profiles but it does offer some extra security for devices that are regularly shared.

Joshua Topolsky of The Verge has done a video comparison between the Windows 8 consumer preview that Microsoft launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Apple’s iPad 2. The 10-minute video goes through the basic features and UIs of both platforms.

Gestures seem to be a big deal in Windows 8, and the “live tiles” concept is a refreshingly different take on interface design. It’s important to remember that this version of Windows 8 is not ready for prime time, so don’t expect the same level of polish that’s currently found in iOS 5.

We’ve heard whispers of Apple launching a streaming video service in the iTunes Store before, and now a new report from The New York Post claims that the company is “pushing ahead” to get such a service off the ground by Christmas.

According to the report, Apple “point man” Eddy Cue has been in talks with leading content providers to negotiate distribution deals for what will presumably pave the way for the mystical iTV.

Can’t find that file you just downloaded?
Keyboard shortcuts are for power users, right? Well, not ONLY them. Even relative newcomers to OS X tend to know about Command-C (Copy), Command-X (Cut), and Command-V (Paste). They might even know how to open the Applications Folder (Command-Shift-A) or the Utilities Folder (Command-Shift-U). But This one was new, even to me, a relatively seasoned user of Mac OS X. Popping open the Downloads folder from the Finder is simple, with a Command-Option-L. Be sure to thank us later. (Update: Or thank the ever vigilant folks in the comments for their good catch – we’re nothing if not responsive.)