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.

The first review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is in, and it’s a good one.

Writing in the New York Times, critic Janet Maslin says the 630-page tome is “clear, elegant and concise.”

Review by Kelly Keltner

Let me begin this review by saying, while I’ve found some love for certain models, I don’t really care for most canalphones: They’re uncomfortable, and while I love the idea of plugging a foreign object into my ear and having that object deliver magical sounds just like an owl delivers a Howler, I usually wind up being disappointed with either the sound or the fit. So, with that in mind, it was time to try the Etymotic mc3 ($100).

This set, with a three-button remote on the cable and four sets of super-sealing, deep-seating eartips (two flanged, two foam), was now tasked with being tested by me. May the Force, that I’ll probably have to use to shove them into my ears, be with them.

Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor invoked Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as an example of fairness that the U.S. should emulate in the heated ongoing debate about income equality.

Not all of us on the Cult of Mac staff walk around with an Apple logo shaved into the back of our head. Actually, none of us do because we value our furs too much. However, there are a few hardcore Apple fans out there that represent the cult with pride. Example #1: As pictured above, this fan had not one, but two iconic Apple images shaved into his hair to commemorate Steve – the famous portrait, as well as the silhouette of Steve’s face inside the Apple logo.

Gene Munster must be having an orgasm right now: in an interview for his upcoming bio with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs said he had finally ‘cracked’ the ‘integrated’ TV problem.

Don’t read too much into this, though. Jobs may not be talking about the iTV, and just the plain AppleTV.

You don’t need a crystal ball to tell you that the iPad 3 is almost definitely coming in March of next year, twelve months after the iPad 2 debuted. What changes will we see with the third generation of Apple’s tablet? Expectations for the iPad 3 include a Retina Display, a slimmer form factor, Siri support, Apple’s next-gen A6 SoC and even the possibility of LTE 4G.

We won’t know for months whether those expectations are accurate, but thanks to a Japanese rumor site, we do have a lead one one change to the iPad 3: it will have a smaller, redesigned dock connector that will require an adapter to work existing Apple Dock Connector products, according to Macotakara. Argh. Not again.

Steve Jobs once famously said that people don’t read anymore, but he did, and amongst the revelations of Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography of Apple’s co-founder are his favorite books and bands.

You probably won’t be surprised by the bands — hey, Steve loved the Beatles, go figure! — but would you ever have guessed that his favorite books include both Moby Dick *and* Mucusless Diet Healing Systems?

If you’re a Mac Pro customer, you’ve been waiting a hella long time for an update at this point. The last revision to the Mac Pro line, after all, came out in July 2010, which in computer upgrade terms may as well be part of the Metazoic era.

So an update’s right around the corner, right? Don’t hold your breath. It’s looking extremely unlikely that the new Mac Pros will come out before early 2012 at the very earliest.

Imagine someone wanting to work for Apple, but saying “they’d have to pay me $1 million a week.” Sounds absurd, right? But T-Mobile is taking a similar tack in its attempt to sell iPhones. The carrier insists the tech giant support a little-known 4G spectrum, AWS.

Another surprising revelation from Walter Isaacson’s upcoming bio of Steve Jobs has leaked out: in the 1980s, Steve Jobs unknowingly met his biological father on multiple occasions.