Apple, a veteran of long lines ahead of iPhone launches in the U.S., has temporarily halted retail sales of the iPhone 4S in China. The tech giant announced Friday it has stopped in-person sales in Beijing and Shanghai “for the time being” in the wake of a near-riot by angry scalpers.

If you need another reason why iPhone rivals just don’t get it, there’s word four of the largest smartphone makers plan to introduce fewer models in a bid to replicate Apple’s success. Ah, if it were only so simple.

The music streaming service Grooveshark, which was pulled from the App Store a while ago after it upset a number of major record labels, has returned to the iPhone — and other mobile devices — with a new HTML5 web app. The app can’t be pulled by Apple this time, but how long will it last?

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – As a kid who grew up in the ’80s, I feel robbed by the tech industry. Robbed, spit upon, and laughed at by a bunch of bald guys in suits who have deprived the ghost of my youth by failing to give me the technology they flaunted when I was a kid. I was promised holograms, damn it, so where the hell are they? Compared to holograms, touchscreens just seem like caveman technology.

Wading through the heaping mess of CES rubbish, I got lost in a time vortex. When I popped out the other side, I stumbled upon this little beauty. Behold! The holographic iPad!

Remember that stunning iPhone designed by Antonio De Rosa that we brought you last week? It’s called the iPhone SJ and it’s a tribute to Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs. It looked pretty great in the photos we published, but it looks even more awesome when brought to life in this new video.

Apple’s carrier partners in Singapore are removing the front- and rear-facing cameras from the Cupertino company’s latest iPhone 4S before selling it, according to a new report. The doctored devices are aimed at members of the military who are prohibited from taking cameras into their bases.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Apple must be feeling very flattered. Also ripped off.

Many of the new Ultrabooks here on display at the Consumer Electronics Show are so similar to the MacBook Air, they can only be described as knockoffs.

Not only do the they rip off the basic design premise — lightweight, portable laptops with long battery life — they copy the same wedge aluminum casing, wedge shape, chiclet keyboard, large, button-less trackpad, and the selection and placement of ports.

See for yourself. Here are just a few of the MacBook Air knockoffs on display at Intel’s massive booth.

If you’re frustrated that your app was rejected from the App Store, you are in good company.

Scott Virkler, senior vice president of eProducts at global science and medical publishing behemoth Elsevier, had a few choice words about Apple’s approval process – and getting rejected by it.

Virkler, speaking in San Francisco at Appnation Enterprise, said his company had three apps rejected by Apple just last week, “because they don’t get our business.”

We’re all fans of Mario Kart and many of Nintendo’s classic titles. But as much as we’d love to see them arrive on iOS, we don’t care much for shameless clones. We’ve seen countless Super Mario clones in the App Store, but Mole Kart is a Mario Kart ripoff that shares more than just a few similarities.

John Sculley, a former Apple CEO who was at the helm of the Cupertino company between 1983 and 1993, has no doubts that it can revolutionize the television set. If anyone’s going to change the experience and the “first principles” of TV, Sculley told the BBC in a recent interview, it’s going to be Apple.

OnLive made headlines earlier this week when the company announced a new iPad app at CES which brings Windows 7 to the iPad, allowing you to run Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Those of you who are interested in the app and you live in the U.S., you can grab it now, for free, from the App Store.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – The forthcoming iPad 3 will be thinner than the iPad 2, Cult of Mac has exclusively learned at the Consumer Electronics Show from a well-placed source.

With competitors already starting to anticipate Apple’s entrance into the TV market, Samsung has felt the need to clarify its confidence and throw Apple under the bus at the same time.

Philip Newton, Director of Audiovisual for Samsung Australia, told The Sydney Morning Herald that Steve Jobs’s revelation to biographer Walter Isaacson about “finally cracking” the iTV is “nothing new.”

Skype has released a new beta for Mac users today that brings an enhanced call UI and more features. Call quality and stabilization improvements have also been introduced.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Our very British Editor Leander and I were invited to sit in with Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane, and Alex Lindsay for Tuesday’s live episode of Macbreak Weekly. We had a hoot ‘n hollerin’ good time playing with new gadgets from the show floor, talking about this year’s trends in tech, and pondering how Microsoft just might be becoming the next Apple.

The full video is almost 80 minutes long, so feel free to skip around to all the good parts where it’s just me talking.

The iPhone 4S is set to finally launch in China tomorrow, but that hasn’t stopped the locals from lining up early to secure access to the coveted handset. The line for Apple’s flagship store in Beijing has gotten so out of control that Apple may have to cancel the launch there altogether.

Reports are coming in that Beijing SWAT teams have already been called in to handle thousands of angry scalpers and potential customers. There have reportedly been fights in the streets between gangs of professional scalpers that buy Apple devices in bulk to then resell at a higher price.

Mercury News is reporting that Apple is renting thousands of square feet for its employees near Cupertino in Sunnyvale, California. According to Colliers International, Apple is ready to move into the 215,000-square-foot Sunnyvale Research Center.

Located 7 miles from the company’s current headquarters in Cupertino, the four-building complex in Sunnyvale isn’t the only nearby location that Apple is renovating. There are also two more buildings in Sunnyvale that will help temporarily house up to 1,300 corporate employees.

End-User License Agreements (or EULAs) are the very bane of our existence here at Cult of Mac, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t helpful information to be gleaned from the jargon we typically ignore while installing software.

There happens to be a particularly interesting tidbit of information nestled in the 17,697-word iTunes Terms and Conditions EULA.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – When Steve Jobs unveiled the sixth generation iPod nano in September of 2010, he coyly said, “You can even wear it as a watch!” Overnight, the “iWatch” was coined and a whole new industry was born, as accessory makers flocked to deliver iPod nano watchbands.

Over the last year, Apple’s added a variety of new graphical watchfaces to the iPod nano, further emphasizing the nano’s suitability as a watch replacement. But that’s not nearly enough. The iPod nano’s inherent iWatchiness is a quality that Apple is still seriously under-exploiting.

Want to know how good a real iWatch could be? Look no further than Sony’s SmartWatch, on display this week at CES.

What’s this? Android news on Cult of Mac? Who cares? Maybe you don’t, maybe you do. Point is: these are a few of the popular topics going on in the Android world today. Maybe you’d like to know what the competition is up to, or perhaps your aunt received a Kindle Fire she needs to update. Regardless of the reason, having a resource such as Cult of Android allows you to learn more about what’s going on with the competition. You know what they say: the best way to beat the enemy is to know which way they’re moving!/em>

Nik Software has released its Snapseed photo editor in the Mac App Store. We told you a couple days ago from CES that Snapseed was headed to the Mac, and the app is now available for $19.99.

Snapseed has been an incredibly popular photo editing app on the iOS platform, so much so that it even won an Apple “App of the Year” award recently. The beautiful design and robust set of features we’ve come to expect from Nik Software is now available on the Mac.

Tim Cook is one of the world’s top CEOs, but you wouldn’t know that by where he lays his head at night. The recently appointed head of Apple Inc. lives in a 2,400-square-foot, relatively modest home in Palo Alto, California.

The four-bedroom condo boasts a tiny yard and small adjunct section of real estate in the back. Not much for a man who was recently awarded a $378 million stock incentive.

Here’s a handful of tricks you can use when selecting text within a document or web page. Like many good tricks, these techniques are simple but could potentially change the way you work with your Mac.

You think your users are hard to please? Try cops, says Travis Taniguchi.

He’s a police criminologist for the Redlands Police Department in California, and one of the driving forces behind an iPhone and iPad app-friendly police department. Cops are not only skeptical, but armed.

“You want to talk hostile customers or end users? You don’t get more hostile than a cop,” Taniguchi joked.”They do that lean back thing, then they put a hand on their gun. It’s not easy.”

As the only “suit” on an Appnation Enterprise Summit panel about upstarts – he was gently ribbed by other panelists about not following the casual jeans-and-blazer mandate – he gave some interesting insights about how police departments can implement mobile apps.