Besides his signature black turtleneck, New Balance sneakers, and blue jeans, Steve Jobs was known for his silver Mercedes SL55 AMG. What was perhaps most interesting about Jobs’ ride was the fact that it never had a license plate.

Jobs’ Mercedes was photographed many times over the last several years, but the car was always plate-free. How did he do it? Did he pay the fine every time he was confronted by the police? Did he obtain a special permit? Did he just get lucky?

The answer is actually very simple.

Apple has released an update to the early 2011 iMac EFI firmware. The new update is labeled version 1.7 and it is available via software update.

The update addresses the following issues:

Apple has released an update to iPhoto bring it to version 9.2.1. This update primarily addresses the complaints about iPhoto quitting unexpectedly that we’ve received from Cult of Mac readers.

The update is available now via Software Update on your Mac. Check out the complete details about iPhoto after the break.

Apple has filed its annual 10-K form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the fiscal year. The company’s spending has increased and there has been a considerable number of new employees added to the payroll since last year.

Steven VanRoekel, the new Chief Information Technology Officer for the United States, says smartphones  and apps have raised the bar for citizen expectations of their government.

The second person to hold the CIO post, after nearly a decade at Microsoft VanRoekel headed to the FCC. There, he launched Apps.gov and ran a public contest for a Mobile Broadband Testing app that earned him a phone call from late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Pixelmator is a very popular image editing tool for the Mac that serves as a much cheaper alternative to Photoshop. The app sports a gorgeous interface that looks like it could have been designed by Apple itself.

Version 2.0 of Pixelmator will launch tomorrow in the Mac App Store with a host of new image editing features, including content-aware fill and support for OS X Lion’s Versions and Auto Save features.

Most of us are hopefully unfamiliar with the prison scene, so Gizmodo has taken an interesting look at technology in California’s San Quentin State Prison. The series is called “Lockdown,” and the latest installment focuses on how smartphones are used behind bars.

Phones in prison are a hot item, going for $300 to $700 behind bars. Inmates use them to communicate with the outside world and orchestrate nefarious activities like drug drop-offs. Prisoners will do basically anything to keep an iPhone from being confiscated. And we do mean anything.

Recently I’ve been talking about some of my favorite Mac OS X tips. Now this week I’ve started sharing some of my favorite tips for iOS. Today I’ll show you how to look up word definitions in iOS using the Define command.

The iPod is essentially Apple’s typewriter: a piece of technology that reshaped society completely, then was made redundant by its descendants. However, the iPod’s birth a decade ago launched a legacy that can’t be ignored, no matter how hard you try.

PBS will be airing a new, hour-long documentary next week about the life of Steve Jobs, and unique to the program will be rare interviews with His Steveness himself, including a never-before-broadcast interview from 1994 where Jobs expounds upon his life’s philosophies.

The program will be called “Steve Jobs – One Last Thing” and will air on your local PBS affiliate on November 2nd at 10:00pm. Here are some more details of what to expect.

There have been a lot of complaints on Twitter that most of the best bits of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs have already leaked. After reading sundry blog posts, news stories and tweets about Jobs’s life, is there anything left to read in the actual book?

Yes, there is. There’s plenty. Although the arc of Steve’s story is generally well known, Isaacson has added a ton of new detail to even the most well-trodden stories from Jobs’s life. Trouble is, a lot of it is about Jobs mistreating people.

Walter Isaacson’s book is an unflinching biography of a manifestly great man. But it’s not a fun read. In fact, sometimes it’s a lot like being locked in a room with a borderline sociopath. Powering through Isaacson’s bio will give you unique insight into how Steve Jobs changed the world, but it’s not necessarily a comforting one.

Up until now, the Angry Birds have stayed terrestrial, pushing their beaks no higher than the cumulus clouds in their squawking, feather-strewn war against the evil Pig Armada.

That’s about to change. The Angry Birds are going to outer space. No, Rovio’s not doing a sci-fi themed Angry Birds sequel, although that’s not a shabby idea: NASA is sending some iPads to the International Space Station, along with an Angry Bird plush toy.

A few weeks ago, we posted the video below to show how Apple saw Siri and the iPad coming back in 1987. We didn’t tell the story behind the video though, which is equally fascinating.

It appears the wave of early disappointment in the iPhone 4S that washed over U.S. consumers has now made it to the United Kingdom. A third of UK consumers were “disappointed” Apple’s new handset didn’t offer more features, according to an Internet survey.

You can hear a collective sospiro of relief from Italian Apple fans today after a judge in Milan denied a request by Samsung to block sales of the iPhone 4S in a preliminary hearing.

At stake was the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 28, the device that some Italians have already been buying on eBay  just to say they’ve established intimate relations with Siri before anyone else.

Steve Jobs was a massive fan of English rock band The Beatles, and once revealed in an interview for 60 Minutes that his business plan was inspired by the group. To honor Steve’s life and his achievements, The Flaming Lips will provide a special performance at the O Music Awards on October 31 where they will perform a cover of The Beatles‘ “Revolution”.

Ever since it first landed in 2010, iPad users have been clamoring for a native port of the great Mint.com app, which allows people who use Intuit’s great personal finance tracking service to watch their spending and savings on the go. Mint.com’s website worked, but just barely: it was really designed with a desktop experience in mind.

Well, the wait’s finally over. Mint.com has just been updated to a universal app, and the iPad version is just a gorgeous piece of work.

Yet another publisher is singing the praises of Apple’s Newsstand appfor the iPad. Magazine publisher Condé Nast announced Tuesday a 268 percent hike in subscriptions after the tech giant released Newsstand as part of iOS5 unveiled in early October.

Apple has reportedly begun building a huge solar farm that will provide power to its data center in North Carolina. According to the report, the farm will be built on 171 acres of land, and will be situated right next door to the data center.

If you missed our editor and resident Steve Jobs expert Leander Kahney on Macbreak Weekly yesterday, you should check out the full episode below. Leander got to sit in with Leo Laporte and the gang to talk about his interview with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, the biography itself, and Steve Jobs the man. It was an interesting and entertaining roundtable.

Following Monday’s report detailing a new Apple pilot program that will allow online shoppers to collect their Apple order from their local retail store, the Cupertino company has now rolled out the service to stores in San Francisco, California. Orders made online can now be collected — often on the same day, if in stock — from the Chestnut Street, Stonestown and San Francisco Apple stores in San Francisco.

I was wrong about the iPhone 4s. I said it would be great. I predicted it would be the best phone ever built. The truth, it turns out, is that the iPhone 4s kind of sucks.

There. I said it.

And it’s not just the iPhone by itself. The iOS 5 upgrade, the design of some new apps and iCloud all add up to a degraded experience with using the iPhone.

Here are the 6 major things wrong with the new iPhone.

(Note: This is a promoted link to a story written by one of our writers for an outside site.)

Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs hit the iBookstore earlier this week, and after a few hours, I wondered why it had such a low star rating. I read some of the reviews to discover that many users have had formatting issues, which made some pages of the book illegible. Apple has now issued an update to the book and begun instructing customers on how to get the new version.

The tip today is a simple one that most Mac experts might already know, but I met a newbie today who didn’t have any idea why there are so many items listed in Recent Items a sub-menu on the Apple menu.

“There are just toooo many recent items under documents,” they said, and complained about the Server item being there when they didn’t have any servers.

So I showed them how to fix it, and now I’ll show you too.

Apple operates under the philosophy that the latest and greatest OS is what everybody should use, but many of us prefer to try things out first and upgrade a bit more slowly. When you dual-boot your Mac among two different versions of Mac OS X some things will work fine, while others require one system or the other:

I’m running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro 3,1 and I just got a new 750GB, 7200rpm drive to put in. Can I create say a 100GB OS X 10.7 Lion partition and share the apps / data from the 10.6.8 partition?