Wall Street analysts can be an odd sort. Apple is seen as a red hot company producing must-have products, yet many observers of the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant are downright wet blankets when it comes to Apple’s future. Monday, a fellow analyst said pessimists predicting Apple will grow -2 percent must live in some alternate universe where up is down and iPhones don’t sell.

If your Mac has a multitouch trackpad, there’s a simple but amazing tweak you can make that could revolutionize the way you use your computer.

Jan-Micheal Cart has made quite a name for himself designing impressive new concepts for the iOS operating system, such as the dynamic icons concept you see above, and an awesome system for implementing widgets which we covered back in May.

However, it seems it’s not just iOS users who have been impressed with Cart’s work. The Apple camp in Cupertino has also picked up on it, and they’ve hired him as an intern.

Just under 18 months after its launch, Apple is set to make more changes to its iAd mobile advertising service in a bid to attract more customers. The Cupertino company is hoping to claw back some of the ground it’s quickly losing to Google’s AdMob service by reducing the initial buy-in to iAd, and changing the way in which advertisers pay.

Apple has expanded the reach of its iTunes Store today by offering music and movie content for the first time across 16 Latin American countries. It has also introduced the new iTunes Match service to users in Brazil, making it the first country outside of the U.S. to gain access to the feature.

This Kickstarter project combines an iPad case with a speaker, hiding the speaker in the case’s front cover. Or rather, the speaker is the front cover.

Apple has issued a firmware update for its professional-grade Thunderbolt Display. Update 1.1 brings minor bug fixes and stability improvements.

Children and Apple stuff mix pretty well — iDevices cap the top three slots on kids’ wishlists, right? So it’s a good bet that there’ll be a bunch of Apple stuff underneath the trees or the Menorah this year. We’ve put together a short list of icing-on-the-cake type gifts — or great follow-ups if you got ’em iDevices last year.

Apple recently requested that Samsung start designing its tablets differently. Why? So as not to infringe on the iPad’s precious design.

What would Samsung’s next tablet look like if Apple had its way? The answer: really, really bad.

There’s so much buzz around Apple and education in the U.S. these days, you’d be forgiven if you assumed there was a “One iPad Per Child” program officially in effect.

Case in point, a school said to have “shunned” Macs in favor of PCs makes news.

Then you read the story, and it turns out that Adam Gerson, tech director for Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City, is a lifelong Apple fan who opted for Microsoft servers after slogging through a decade of trying times while trying to keep a network of Apple servers running smoothly.

Florida – When Salvatore Miglino went to pick up his son at his former mother-in-law’s house for a court-appointed visit, he figured there would be trouble.

So he started filming secretly with his iPhone, which may have turned out to be a lifesaver. Cheryl Hepner, his 66-year-old ex mother-in-law, went ballistic and pumped three shots into him before her .22 caliber Beretta pistol jammed.

Microsoft has released an iPad version of its popular OneNote app. The note-taking app is available in the App Store for free with limited functionality. A $14.99 in-app purchase unlocks the ability to take an unlimited number of notes, while free users are limited to 500.

The Computer History Museum currently has a great exhibit of Steve Jobs on their website. Among the neat tibits on their site is a 20minute video gifted from marketing guru Regis McKenna that shows Steve Jobs explaining the history of Apple back in his younger years. The video was probably recorded sometime in the early 1980’s as Steve and his crew were secretly working on the Macintosh after Apple had been enjoying an enormous amount of success from the Apple II.

Apple has released iTunes 10.5.2 to the public alongside an update to its iTunes Match service. The new version of iTunes only deals with audio distortion issues when playing or importing certain CDs. Apple has remained vague about the specific improvements that have been made to iTunes Match.

Noting that the latest iTunes Match features “several improvements,” Apple has made its new download available in Software Update and on its website.

We’ve got an affinity for great Apple tattoos here at Cult of Mac, but let’s face facts: most of them are pretty bad. But the Apple-themed tattoo we’ve fallen in love with today is a lot better than another hipster giving him or herself a “Think Different” tramp stamp.

Reader Karissa B. wrote us to show off her new Apple tattoo. We already liked it a lot: not only is the retro-style Apple logo nursing a mean mouthful of fangs, but the Pac Man like motif of Cupertino trying to gobble up its Clyde in a fleeing Microsoft logo was funny and whimsical. But it’s the story about what the tattoo means and why Karissa got it that really makes this tattoo shine.

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman has been peeling through the .plist files of the latest iOS 5.1 beta, and it appears that Apple is screwing with bloggers on purpose: weary of people dissecting the iOS files for mention of future iPhones and iPads, iOS 5.1 Beta 2 references the Apple TV 9, iPad 8, and iPhone 10, among others.

We’ve dedicated more than a few posts t0 declaring that a new iPad or iPhone is coming thanks to .plist references, but even so, I think this is pretty funny. Way to screw with a poor tech blogger’s head, Apple! The message is clear from here on out: you can’t trust iOS’s .plist files for a scoop. Well done!

Spotlight search on an iOS device is a fantastic feature. If, like me, you have pages and pages filled with apps, it’s easy to find the one you’re looking for simply by typing the first few letters of its name into Spotlight. You can do the same with songs, contacts, messages, emails, reminders, events, and lots, lots more.

However, there may be some things you don’t want to show in Spotlight. That doesn’t mean you should avoid the feature altogether — just customize its results to suit you. It’s incredibly easy, and not only will this remove items you don’t want to see, it’ll also make it faster to find what you’re looking for.

If you’ve got a developer account, time to get downloading: Apple has just knocked up the second beta of iOS 5.1.

In addition, Apple’s gone ahead and updated the beta of the latest Apple TV software, as well as release Xcode 4.3 Developer Preview 2.

Release notes are below, but here’s hoping Cupertino’s finally cracked some of those battery life issues.

If you’re a fan of The Neverending Story, here’s an iPad case that even a Rockbiter could love.

If you’re an iPad user and sick of waiting for something like the Mac’s Dashboard to appear on your tablet, you’ll love to know about iDashboard, a new iPad offering that consolidates many individual apps into one screen.

I can guess your age by asking you two questions: What smartphone do you own and what’s your favorite mobile game? If you answered Android and Angry Birds, you must be between 35 and 44 years old. Turns out, 35 percent of that age group simply adores Angry Birds, while younger gamers could care less about the blue, red and yellow pig-haters.

We all know how the mano a mano duel between an iPad and a blender turns out, but what happens when you open up an iPad 2 and then plop it down in some molten lava? That’s just what accessory maker ZooGue wanted to find out, so they jumped on a plane to Hawaii and then threw their iPad 2 into a volcano.

The result? Pretty much as you expect: the iPad 2 complains about the heat for awhile, then bursts into flame and melts into metallic goo. It’s strangely cathartic, but that’s doubtless because it’s not my iPad 2.

[via NeoWin]

Are you underage and in need of a drink? There used to be an app for that, but not anymore. Apple has pulled an app that created fake driver’s licenses after a U.S. Senator from New Jersey complained it “poses a threat to public safety and national security.” No more 19-year-old Al Qaeda members trying to sneak in on happy hour, I guess.

Short on cash for the holidays? If you don’t mind shopping at Radio Shack and have an old iPhone to trade-in, you can get a killer deal on a new iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S this week.

How killer? Well, how does a free iPhone 4S with no money down sound to you? Pretty good? Well, guess what: play your cards right and you could not only get a free iPhone 4S, you’ll get Radio Shack to pay you a little money to take an iPhone 4S off their hands. You just need to combine the right offers.