You probably don’t give too much thought to all the parts that make up your shiny new iPhone 4S, but there’s a whole Apple economy built in.

For example: that sharp new 8-megapixel camera that is a key feature of the new device is causing a lot of headaches for a company called OmniVision Technologies Inc. — there are already two law firms looking into what happened when Omnivision realized that it couldn’t supply as promised the camera for the iPhone 4S.

If you’ve been using OS X Lion, you’ve probably noticed the linen theme in some of the interface elements. If you initiate Mission Control, you’ll notice the wonderful linen texture on the outside border of your screen. Apple has brought this design to aspects of iOS, including the Notification Center background.

A guy took the swatches Apple uses in Lion and created full-res wallpapers for everyone to enjoy. You can download these linen-themed wallpapers for your iPhone and iPad.

Apple’s on a roll this week after the plethora of updates yesterday Apple has released three more new ones today. They are HP Printer Software Update 2.8, Aperture Update 3.2.1 and Thunderbolt Software Update 1.0.

All of these are available now via Software Update on your Mac. Check out all the gory details after the break.

Back in 1997 at the beginning of the Second Jobs Dynasty, Apple introduced a special edition Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM) to celebrate the company’s 20th year in business. The TAM was positioned as a high-end luxury system, selling for $7000 and delivered by a tuxedo clad technician, but highlighted where Apple was heading in industrial design with a vertical orientation, elegant fit and finish, and an LCD display later adopted by the iMac.

In this promotional video a (then) relatively unknown Apple designer named Jony Ive (with a full head of hair) shows off his newest baby and explains the company’s design philosophy. The TAM was a flop in the marketplace but foreshadowed Apple’s subsequent design renaissance, and has since become a coveted collector’s item.

[via 512 Pixels]

Dropbox Teams is a new service that the popular cloud storage and sync service is offering to small businesses and professional groups. The new plan is designed to encourage collaboration and large data transfers between a limited group of people.

The service will start at $795 per year for up to five users, with $125 per additional user. Dropbox uses Amazon’s S3 backend for secure data transfers with AES-256 bit encryption. Customers are able to access their shared Dropbox folders on a array of devices, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac.

Bloomberg and DirectTV have both announced live video streaming services today that offer on-demand video content for iPad users.

Bloomberg TV+ offers free, live 24-hour coverage from its network on the iPad and the ability to download content for watching offline. DirectTV’s iPad app offers free, live TV for its customers.

You can set up your iPhone notifications in many ways. You might like vibrating alerts, audible alerts, or maybe you don’t want any alerts at all. Now there is a new visual alert, but it’s buried away and hard to find.

Today I’ll fix that and show you where it is hiding.

Holy cow, this is an awesome deal. The latest game from Halfbrick Studios — the guys behind Fruit Ninja — is called Jetpack Joyride, and between me and my girlfriend, I’ve probably put more time into it in the last couple of weeks than I did into my senior year thesis.

It usually costs ninety-nine cents, but Halfbrick Studios has teamed up with Apple to offer Jetpack Joyride for free to people who sign up for the official Apple App Store Facebook page.

That’s a heck of a deal. Too bad I already own Jetpack Joyride! Let’s hope the next freebie is this good.

Late last month, Apple rolled out the iTunes Music Store to twelve new European countries. Now they’ve done the same for the iTunes Movie Store, so if you’re Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian or from Cyprus, hey, go nuts!

[via MacTrast]

Care to see just what Apple means when they talk about Android’s fragmentation problem? Check out this incredible chart put together by Michael Degusta. Not only are most Android phones out of date, but almost half of the smartphones on this chart have never been up-to-date with the latest version of Android OS, even at release!

Comparatively, every release of iOS has been backwards compatible for at least three years. No wonder the iPhone developer community is so strong: devs and users alike can count on almost every iPhone owner being on the current, most bug-free version of iOS!

We thought we’d put this Apple television business to rest as a pipe-dream, but then Steve Jobs’s biography came out, where he claimed he had finally “cracked” the TV problem. Now the rumor mill has started itself up again with renewed vigor, and the latest report from Nick Bilton over at The New York Times: his sources tell him that Jobs thought that the “industry was totally broken” a real Apple-branded television set “isn’t a matter of if, but when,” a “guaranteed product.”

It’s not quite Game Over for Nintendo, but Angry Birds and other iPhone games cost the company nearly $1 billion for the first half of 2011. What’s more, an aging Wii is being overshadowed as more and more gamers turn to smartphones. It’s enough to give Donkey Kong indigestion.

The BlackBerry is popular again. Ha ha ha. Sorry, just kidding. That popularity extends only to owners rushing to trade them in after a recent nationwide service outage.

Indeed, one firm specializing in buying your unwanted phones says BlackBerry trade-ins are up 80 percent this week — and it can be entirely attributed to long beleaguered Blackberry owners trading in their devices for the iPhone 4S.

Fancy a break from the constant tintinnabulation of your iPhone? Here’s a great Siri tip spotted by the guys over at OS X Daily: just press down the hold button and tell Siri to “turn off all alarms.”

Once you’ve been able to catch your breath, turning your alarms all on again is as easy as saying “turn on all alarms.”

We reported yesterday that our favorite Photoshop-on-a-budget app, Pixelmator, was hitting the big two point oh today, and so it has.

It’s available now on the Mac App Store as a free upgrade to previous users, or a $29.99 purchase new.

The biggest additions to Pixelmator 2.0 are content-aware fill, vector drawing and editing tools, wrinkle, blemish and damage repair tools for photos, new retouching tools such as smudge, sponge, burn, and more. In addition, Pixelmator 2.0 gets full OS X Lion support, a new interface and some impressive speed and stability improvements.

For 90% of us, Pixelmator was already a better and cheaper replacement for the industry standard, Adobe PhotoShop. With 2.0, closes the gap another few percent, and becomes even more of a no-brainer to recommend to just about everybody.

If Apple needed another argument in favor of the iPhone, Sprint’s CEO Wednesday offered up a whopper: iOS devices are 50 percent more efficient than Android handsets when it comes to slurping up 3G data. The comment seems to confirm previous reports that devices running Google’s mobile operating system are the data hogs, not iPhones.

Ever since Steve Jobs’s untimely death and the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography, America’s been going Steve crazy… but you know where Jobsmania is even worse? China. In fact, from the launch lines, you’d think it was the iPad 3 that was coming out, not a book.

If you use your iPhone or iPad in a speaker dock, you’ll understand that the ability to control it from across the room would be just awesome. Apple may already be working on a solution, according to one of the company’s patent applications, which suggests future Macs and iOS devices could be controlled from afar using special gestures.

In a classic example of the ‘tipping point’, a research firm which once advised enterprises they need only support Windows, now urges companies embrace Macs. “Stand in the way of Apple users,” the firm says, “and you will eventually get run over.”

One thing that many seem to forget about Apple’s new voice recognition assistant is that it’s still in beta. Although Siri is available to iPhone 4S users in Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, you can’t expect a seamless experience.

While many have still been impressed with the feature since its release, others are too quick to criticize it. A report from British tabloid The Daily Mail today brands Siri a frustration that has left Scottish users “bamboozled” because it cannot understand their accent.

Codify is an awesome new app for the iPad from Two Lives Left which allows you to create games and simulations — “or just about any visual idea you have” — without a computer. It claims to be the most beautiful code editor you’ll use, and it’s optimized for a touch-based device, allowing you to “touch your code.”

If there’s one feature we’re all anticipating for the iPad 3, it’s a Retina display. We’ve become accustomed to high-resolution displays on our mobile devices since Apple first introduced the Retina display to the iPhone and the iPod touch, and we all want one on the iPad 3.

According to one report, the third-generation device will indeed boast a 2048 x 1536 resolution display, but LG and Samsung are struggling to produce enough of them to meet Apple’s demands.

Adobe has today launched a set of new applications for its Carousel photography service that allow users to gain access to their images, and edit them, from their Mac and iOS devices. Both applications are free and are available now in their respective App Stores.

Let’s face it: Chess is pretty geeky. Then again, so is the iPad (c’mon, it is). Blend the two though, and you’ve got…well, let’s just say that playing chess on an iPad at your local coffee hangout is a Wookie’s fingernail-width less geeky than insert-hyperbolic-geek-stereotype-here.

Who cares though; with its portability, large screen and potential to reach all 600 million chess players around the world, the iPad is the ultimate gadget for playing electronic chess, and the free Social Chess app is the way to play.

Hot on the heels of the early 2011 iMac firmware update comes an EFI firmware update for the mid-2011 MacBook Air and Mac Mini. The new updates are labeled version 2.2 and 1.4 respectively. The updates are available via Software Update or direct download.

The updates address the following issues: