The growing importance of international iPhone sales, along with demand for Apple’s latest smartphone, should remove any Wall Street doubt that the fourth quarter was only a fluke. One analyst Monday announced bullish expectations for the first quarter of 2012, forecasting 42 million iPhones will have sold in December – more than double that of last quarter.

Apple’s MacBook Pro family wasn’t the only product lineup to get an update today. The Cupertino company has also issued a refresh to its iPad 2 Smart Covers, which has seen the orange cover discontinued in favor of a new dark gray model, and interior lining that’s colored to match the exterior.

Apple is set to launch a new pilot program that will allow customers to make orders through its online store and then collect their purchases from their local Apple store, according to a new report. The program has reportedly been given the name “Sherwood” and will cover any product available online, including custom-build computers, third-party accessories, and products which have been gift-wrapped an engraved.

The belief that Apple will enter the TV set market appears too good to let drop. One high-profile Apple analyst tells investors Monday the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant already has prototypes of a device worth $2.5 billion next year.

Apple has fixed an issue with Mission Control’s All Windows mode in Mac OS X 10.7.2 that will make a lot of people happy. You can now rearrange the desktop spaces and full-screen applications by dragging. The Dashboard and the first desktop space remain fixed in place at the first and second places in the desktop spaces and full-screen applications list.

Although dragging these objects around is new, the trick to getting it to work is similar to a previous tip.

iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’ve been running several special features which we hope will allow our readers to look back at Apple’s most iconic product with fun and fondness.

Over the last ten years, the iPod has gone from a single device designed to hold your MP3s to a family of devices that have literally revolutionized the music industry.

As part of our iPod 10th Anniversary Celebrations, we put together this family tree infographic so you can look back at all of the iPods that have come before, and helped get us to where we are now: the future of digital music.

Feel free to repost this graphic, but if you do, please make sure to link to Cult of Mac. Thanks!

When an optical CD/DVD drive begins to fail, it usually has trouble with recordable media first. A few simple tests can help verify whether the problem is with the drive or the media:

I have a macbook and recently I cannot put a cd in to record or have recorded. This happened before with toast. And I found I had something set wrong. What am I supposed to set this on so it will quit ejecting my cds?

Ernie

Maybe you’re not going to buy a pair of earphones based on the way they look; maybe you’d rather spend your moolah on a pair that came with exquisite performance. What if you could have both? In spades? Here you go: With their deep, bone-tingling bass and blue-blood looks and manners, the Klipsch Image S4i earphones ($100) is the Prince…of Spades.

Cult of Mac Deals is back with an all new deal for you. Ever thought about getting a scanner, but held back because of size and cost? Do you have a Mac and a digital camera?

Then good news! Prizmo for Mac offers a great solution to accomplish your scanning needs without the extra hardware.

So, what can Prizmo do for you?

Well for starters, it performs excellent OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning on your books, magazines, receipts, invoices or any other document turning them into data-rich spotlight scannable files. Beyond OCR scanning, Prizmo can also completely alter the perspective of any photograph.

We’ve seen a number of rumors surrounding a MacBook Pro refresh in recent weeks, and just as expected, the latest models hit the Apple online store this morning. In addition to increased storage for some models, there are speed improvements across the board with faster Intel Core i5 and i7 processors.

Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus has reportedly left Apple just days after his sophisticated voice-recognition technology made its debut on the iPhone 4S. It was an ‘amicable’ departure, according to sources, that will allow Kittlaus to focus on “new entrepreneurial ideas.”

If you have questions for Steve Jobs’ authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, please post them here in the comments.

I have an interview with Isaacson today at 3PM PST. It’s a telephone interview, and I’ll be sure to ask him some questions in the comments.

I’ll post the interview as soon as I get it transcribed, likely early Monday evening.

  I arrived at this party pretty late — I’m probably the junior member here at the Cult of Mac, as far as Apple adoption goes. I haven’t discussed it directly with the entire staff, but I’m almost certain everyone else here had been using Steve’s gadgets long before I started.

My wholesale defection from PC to Mac finally happened in 2005, when I walked out of the Stonestown Galleria Apple Store, beaming, with a 12-inch iBook G4, never to return to the world of Windows. But the journey began two years earlier, when I met and fell in love with my first Apple product.

Yes, it was an iPod.

If you want to hear a really great, revealing and insightful tribute to Steve Jobs, tune into the Celebrating Steve video Apple posted earlier and go to the 48.30 mark.

Here Apple’s long-time head designer Jony Ive starts talking about his “best and most loyal friend.”

Ive’s tribute to Steve is by turns funny, touching and insightful. Unlike a lot of the negative stuff we’ve heard about Steve over the last few weeks, Jony describes Steve’s passion and enthusiasm, his sense of humor, and his great joy in doing things right.

I’d love to post the video here, but it’s streaming only for the moment. Here’s a snippet of what he said:

Now while hopefully the work appeared inevitable. Appeared simple, and easy, it really cost. It cost us all, didn’t it?

But you know what? It cost him most. He cared the most. He worried the most deeply.

He continues:

The official Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson is now available in the U.S. iBookstore. The book officially goes on sale tomorrow, but it has been popping up early on Amazon Kindle stores and iBookstores around the world.

Simply titled “Steve Jobs,” the biography takes a thorough look at the many sides of Jobs and the stories surrounding his rise to becoming one of America’s greatest innovators and CEOs.

I thought the 60 Minutes interview broadcast just now with Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson was great. Absolutely great.

It covered a lot of ground I was familiar with and is familiar to most other Apple fans too. But it fresh and fascinating because of the accumulation of small details and revelations. Like the fact that Jobs rarely locked his back door in Palo Alto, and that anybody could have walked in off the street, because he didn’t want to pervert his life by being rich. Alternatively, he looked his childhood friend Daniel Kottke in the eye and denied him the shares in Apple that would have made him a millionaire. So many contradictions.

But there were three profound revelations for me, which really shed light on Jobs’ life and work:

Apple has posted the entire video recording of its company celebration of Steve Jobs’ life. The event was filmed at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California and retail employees watched via a live feed around the world during the event.

The celebration took place October 19th, 2011 and clocks in at 80 minutes. You can watch it on Apple’s website.

(Thanks, Jack!)

CBS has posted its complete 60 Minutes interview with Steve Jobs Biographer Walter Isaacson.

The episode is divided into three main parts with one special feature for the web. The full interview transcript is also available for reading. Isaacson’s biography of Jobs will officially go on sale tomorrow, and the book has begun to appear already in certain iBook stores around the world.

 A decade ago Apple introduced the iPod, and with it a new method for controlling music playback: a scroll wheel with buttons around the perimeter. The interface was novel for a portable music player, which usually used more traditional buttons in a linear or grid layout.

The scroll wheel was the brainchild of Phil Schiller, Apple’s Director of Marketing. He realized that users would have to navigate large lists of songs, and that a wheel offered an intuitive, dynamic solution.

iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’re running several special features this weekend. We’ll have an illustrated cultural history, appreciations and op eds. Check back for more.

This Mursi woman has two tools essential to survival in Southern Ethiopia: an AK47 and her iPod.

Ever wondered how the iPod became so ubiquitous? Where it came from? How Apple kept all competitors at bay, and made the iPod the key music technology of the 21st century?

We’ve got you covered in this cool infographic of the history of the iPod:

The original iPod, just a decade old today, was little more than a hard disk with earbuds. But this humble little gadget launched five revolutions that made consumer electronics what it is today.

In fact, everything Apple is today sprang from the iPod seed. From Apple’s revenues to design influence to the fundamental business and distribution models that glue the industry together, the iPod started it all.

So put in those white earbuds and click “play.” Because if you love consumer electronics, you’re about to hear how the iPod started it all.

A recent report details an interesting tale of woe for preorder iPhone 4S customers. These customers decided that the right thing to do would be to preorder their iPhone 4S for home or office delivery. After all that sure beats waiting in line for hours on launch day right?

Unfortunately for some customers that isn’t true since they are going to have to wait weeks to get their preordered iPhone 4S while Apple Stores or other brick-and-mortar stores either had or continue to have stacks of them.

The biggest problem – they can’t even cancel their pre-orders and buy one from a local store.

The days of the stand-alone music player may be over, but the iPod’s role as the preeminent fitness gadget could keep the product relevant for the next decade to come.

William Joye, who originally reported the problem about iOS 5 updates bricking first generation iPads, has reported back that the prescribed fix using Redsn0w fixed the problem with his iPad.

Here are the steps he used to bring his first generation iPad back to life.

iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’re running several special features this weekend. We’ll have an illustrated cultural history, appreciations and op eds. Check back for more.

Fire, the wheel, and the iPod. In the history of invention, gadgets don’t come more iconic than Apple’s digital music player.

The iPod is to the 21st century what the big band was to the ’20s, the radio to the ’40s, or the jukebox to the ’50s – the signature technology that defines the musical culture of the era. And what a marvelous technology the iPod is. Inside Apple’s little white box is magic, pure magic, in the guise of music.