Following Apple’s incredible sales numbers from yesterday’s quarterly earnings report, the iPhone has taken the number one spot in U.S. market share from Google’s Android OS, according to the researchers at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. 37 million iPhones were sold in the fourth quarter of 2011, making Apple the top smartphone manufacturer on the planet.

Based on the last 12 weeks of sales in 9 countries (including the U.S., U.K., and Australia), the iPhone is growing faster than Android. The tides are turning.

Sick of the boring old gray linen background on your Siri? If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone 4S, why not try the new Custom Siri Background Cydia tweak, which allows you to apply a picture from your Camera Roll as Siri’s background wallpaper.

Apple has passed Exxon as the world’s most valuable company before, only to lose the title shortly thereafter, but after last night’s blow-out holiday quarter results, Apple is once again the undisputed king of Wall Street, beating Exxon Mobil’s market cap by a cool $6 billion. Let’s hope this time it lasts!

There was an earlier report of Apple going after the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for violating its slide to unlock patent, which left most Android users scratching their heads. It was obvious that the new unlock feature in Ice Cream Sandwich was vastly different than the traditional slide to unlock, leaving many to chalk this up to another Apple patent trolling. Now we know this isn’t the case, thanks to a report in the Korean Herald, in which an unnamed Samsung official says:

When riding your fixed gear bike to the Apple Store is no longer cool, how do you take your hipsterism to the next level? Penny-farthing.

Have you seen anything more ridiculous than this at your local Apple store? Tell us about it in the comments.

Apple is preparing to produce its next iPhone model for release this summer, according to unnamed source at the China-based supplier Foxconn. While a number of varying sample devices are floating around, the next iPhone could include a 4-inch screen with a form factor unlike the current iPhone 4S.

For a company named after nature’s candy, Apple’s releases a surprising lack of edible products. That’s not likely to change any time soon, but if you’d like a cake or a bit of pastry with Apple’s eye for style and incredible packaging design, look no further than this incredible Taiwanese bakery.

This week on our Instagram feed  we’ve created a new series called #ThisIsWhereiBlog to give readers a glimpse of what it’s like to write for Cult of Mac. As interesting as it is to see how Nicole Martinelli enjoys cozying up in an Eames Lounge Chair, and that John Brownlee blogs in the company of budgerigars, we’d love to see what life looks like from YOUR end.  This weekend we’ll be compiling a gallery of reader-submitted photos that reveal where they blog/surf the web. Do you blog in a secret cupboard under a staircase? On the beach? We wanna see it.

To get included the gallery, take a picture of where you blog  and post it on either Instagram or Twitter with the tag #ThisIsWhereiBlog. We’ll collect the best ones and display them on Cult of Mac this weekend.

While the pair were huge rivals at the helms of two competing companies, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still somewhat fond of each other. In a recent interview with ABC News and Yahoo!, Gates recounts his last visit to Jobs’s house during his final months, the conversation they shared, and how Jobs’s passing has affected him.

This year’s edition of Macworld, taking place January 26-28, is shaping up to be a bit of a departure from Macworlds of the past. 2012 is a year of evolution for the event, now branded as Macworld/iWorld.

And that evolution begins tonight with a blast.

Nuff said. [via Science Dump]

Some of Apple’s stock iPhone apps would work wonderfully on the iPad, such as Clock, Stocks, Weather, and Calculator. But the Cupertino company seems to have no plans to port these apps over to the larger device. After all, I’m sure if it did we’d already have them by now.

But thanks to a new utility for jailbroken iPads called Belfry, you can port them over yourself.

Beginning March 1st, Google will roll most of its privacy policies into one new main privacy policy to cover the majority of its products. Google has been slowly working towards the goal of creating a unified and more personal experience across their products and the new privacy policy is just another step in that direction.

If you were concerned that Apple was all out of surprises, Tuesday put that all to rest. The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant surpassed Wall Street expectations and the amateurs, making analysts fall over themselves describing Apple’s first quarter of 2012 results as “historic.”

Spotlight is a love it/hate it experience. Don’t stop reading if you hate it, however, because here’s a tip that shows how useful Spotlight can be if used correctly. A simple trick lets you search for emails or documents by a particular author, which can be extremely useful when trying to track down that elusive file or message.

The U.S. government declared the act of jailbreaking legal on July 26, 2010, encouraging hundreds of thousands of iOS users into hacking their devices, safe in the knowledge that their actions would incur no legal repercussions. The ruling certainly had a huge on the jailbreaking community, but the tables could be set to turn once again.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), jailbreaking could become illegal again this year, but you can do your bit to prevent it.

Meet one-eyed Evi, a one-dollar alternative to Siri which works on older (non-4S) iPhones.

She’s had a bit of a rough introduction to life, thanks to a much-hyped launch followed by 24 hours or so of struggling to keep up with demand.

Despite being labeled the first real competitor to the iPad, it seems Amazon’s 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet still has a long way to go before it can lure tablet users away from Apple’s device. Although it seemed to be incredibly popular when it launched last year, largely thanks to that attractive $199 price tag, Apple CEO Tim Cook says the Kindle Fire, and other “limited function tablets,” had no impact on iPad sales whatsoever.

Developers have already received several pre-release builds of Apple’s OS X Lion 10.7.3 software, and we had expected last week’s release to be the last one before the update goes public. But it seems there’s still some testing to be done. Apple has seeded yet another build to developers through the Mac Dec Center, this time with the build number 11D50.

O2, once Apple’s exclusive cell phone company reseller of iPhones in the UK, has been caught exposing user phone numbers in the headers sent to websites its customers visit while using its 3G network.

Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky’s highly anticpated Inside Apple book is now available for download in the iBookstore. The books is set to hit the shelves tomorrow, but iBooks users can get their hands on the juicy read right now.

Here’s another perspective on today’s numbers that should knock your socks off: Apple’s iPhone sales surpass the world’s birth rate. Not only has Apple become the top smartphone manufacturer in the world, but there are now more iPhones sold than babies born each day.

Following today’s incredible earnings report for the first fiscal quarter of 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a company-wide email asking employees to meet in Cupertino’s Town Hall tomorrow at 10 AM. The email notes that the company will be talking about “exciting new things.”

This internal meeting follows the release of iBooks 2, iBooks Author and the iTunes U app at Apple’s education event in New York City last week.

Apple held its Q1 2012 fiscal earnings call this afternoon, and the company reported record-breaking numbers across the board. Revenue reached $46.33 billion with a net profit of $13.06 billion, more than doubling Apple’s profit since this time last year.

We’ve got a roundup of interesting numbers from this afternoon’s call for you to check out.

Today during Apple’s Q1 2012 earnings report, CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple has a staggering $97 billion in cash, with over $60 billion currently held offshore. Oppenheimer said multiple times during the call that Apple was not letting its near-$100 billion in cash “burn a hole” in its pockets.

Tim Cook and Oppenheimer were very tight-lipped about what Apple plans to do with its gigantic cash reserve moving forward, noting that the company was “thrilled” to acquire the “fantastic tech talent” at flash memory firm Anobit.

Coincidentally, AAPL stock blew past its previous all-time high during after-hours trading today at over $450 per share. Apple has trumped Exxon Mobile again with a overall valuation of over $420 billion to become the most valuable company on the planet. Based on this past quarter’s iPhone sales, Apple is also the top smartphone manufacturer in the world.