I’ve always wanted to learn how to play piano, to be a chain-smoking, Jelly Roll Morton style jazz tinkler… but I’ve never really had the equipment to get it done. I’m sort of excited, then, by the Piano Apprentice accessory: just slap an iPad into the small keyboard accessory, and you should be on your road to ragtime in, well, no time at all.

We’re all aware of how popular Apple’s tablet is. It spawns endless lines outside of Apple stores for days after its launch, and it no other tablet is anywhere close to being as successful. Apple’s iPad is so popular in fact, that one in six Hong Kong citizens own the device.

If you’ve ever played the classic NES fighter, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, you can probably sympathize with Nintendo right now: an absolutely huge juggernaut of an enemy has filled their screen, capable of knocking them out with a one-two punch… a blow that is only tipped by a sly wink a millisecond before.

That enemy’s Apple, and it is fighting with two weighted gloves with the iPhone and iPad, accordingly. Now Nintendo’s so punch-drunk that they are dramatically lowering the price of their latest console, the Nintendo 3DS, less than six months after it debuted.

Apple’s patents can often be an exciting glimpse into the super secret things that are being worked on at the Cupertino camp, however, this one gives no indication of the features that may arrive in future Apple devices. Instead, it covers the tool that Apple already uses to cut its logo into a number of its products.

Who controls the U.S. smartphone market? It’s a tie between Apple and Android with RIM and others trailing far behind according to new research.

For years, Apple has been affiliated with a little online shopping portal called CVN.org, otherwise known as the Christian Value Network. The site raises money for various religious groups by taking a small slice of product purchases at over 600 participating companies, including Apple and iTunes.

Sounds innocuous, right? Except that several of those religious groups are described as “active hate groups” that regularly engage in “anti-gay, anti-women” activities. And after a petition that garnered 22,000 signatures, Apple has yanked their support from the CVN and pulled iTunes from the network.

Yet another report indicates Apple’s iPad beats the pack of Android tablets until at least 2015. More polished and less expensive alternatives could cut Cupertino’s comfortable marketshare by more than a third, new research finds.

Photos published by TechCrunch this morning reportedly claim to be of the upcoming “iPhone Lite,” with panels made from plastic rather than glass, and a “metal banding around the edge.” However, I’m adamant it’s just a poor quality white iPhone 4 conversion kit. What do you think?

Qualcomm launched its augmented reality SDK for iOS yesterday, allowing app developers to create impressive augmented reality apps for our devices. While augmented reality is nothing new to iOS, Qualcomm’s SDK should mean more AR apps in the App Store because it makes it easier for developers to create apps for a number of different platforms.

It seems reasonable by now to expect Apple’s iPhone 5 to launch this September. Considering all the speculation we’ve waded through over the past few months, a September launch has certainly been the most consistent claim. And while we’re no closer to an exact launch date, the China Times pinpoints the second week of September for the launch of the fifth-generation device, and later this fall for the launch of the iPad 3.

Negotiating Apple’s in-app purchase rules stalled one app for two months, even though it was similar to the company’s iPhone app which made it through the approval gauntlet in just a week.

Do you have plans to purchase one of Apple’s brand spanking new MacBook Airs? Well then you may want to hold off on ordering from Apple’s online store.

Amazon is currently offering the entry-level 11-inch MacBook Air at a 5% discount off Apple’s retail price, so you end up saving about $50. Also, there’s free shipping.

Did you just get a beautiful, new MacBook Air? Apple’s new notebooks are super-slim, and they work great with OS X Lion.

However, installing Snow Leopard on a 2011 MacBook Air may not go over so well, as Apple’s older cat doesn’t apparently play nice with its newest notebook. Luckily, Apple has published a KnowledgeBase article to help you fix Snow Leopard on your brand new MacBook Air.

We all know that the iPad has been nothing short of a phenomenal consumer success. In terms of sales and mindshare, Apple dominates the tablet market with a product that’s barely 18 months old.  When the iPad was first introduced, the highly-portable device was automatically seen as the perfect gaming device— with big names in the App Store, like Angry Birds, creating iPad-optimized versions of their popular gaming titles.

Now, the CEO of Electronic Arts has chimed in and confirmed that EA’s fasting growing platform is not a traditional console- but instead the iPad.

If you love e-reading and the Kindle app for the iPad, you may have noticed the familiar “Kindle Store” button missing. Its absence is causing an uproar online and prompting questions whether Apple is unintentionally pushing consumers to buy iBook alternatives.

At $29.99, Lion was priced so cheap that everyone could afford the upgrade. Everyone except John Christman, that is, who found that his PayPal account was charged $3878.38 by Apple.

If you hit the road a lot, the problem is always chargers. Remembering chargers. Keeping them organized. Preventing them from tying themselves up in knots at the bottom of your gadget bag.

Aviiq’s got a gorgeous little solution to all of these little road warrior problems. Called the Portable Charging Station, it’s an accessory that is a lot more useful than it might first suggest: it’s a tidy, foldable bag with all the cables and charging equipment inside. Just zip it up and go.

Apple recently announced that they’d sold just over 15 billion apps in just three years, which got ZDNet’s Eric Lai doing some number crunching, and it turns out that the App Store has just passed a big milestone: Apple’s now selling apps faster than McDonald’s can sell hamburgers.

Despite what seems like too much iPhone 5 speculation at times, technical specifications and design details regarding Apple’s fifth-generation device are still very much a mystery to mere mortals like you and I. However, that doesn’t stop 35% of consumers wanting to buy the device before they’ve even seen it.

Not all patent defenses against Apple are created equally, HTC has learned. A trade court told the Android handset maker its shiny bundle of $300 million S3 patents aren’t infringed by Apple’s iPhone or iPad, and just partially by Mac OS X.

Rumor has it that Apple is already working on a new method of charging our iPhones for 2012, and many believe the company may introduce wireless magnetic charging using technology developed by WiTricity. But according to a report from DigiTimes, future iOS devices may absorb all the energy they need from the sun.

Apple’s latest line of Mac mini compact desktops offer some pretty impressive specifications. What with those latest Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and the opportunity to grab a solid-state drive with a custom build, you can get a super speedy mini if you have the money.

One thing you can’t get for your new machine, no matter have much money you have, is 16GB of RAM… at least not from Apple.

While OS X Lion offers many improvements and new features, it also takes some away. One that jumped out to me right away was the missing Library folder. By default, Apple now hides this folder to prevent users from messing up their system. While this might not seem substantial to the average user, more advanced users might not like this change. Fortunately, this change can be reversed, as I’ll show you in this video.

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The Today Show took a peek in one of China’s faux Apple stores and it looks just as convincing as the photo gallery we published.

The Pentagon and Veterans Affairs have developed a number of iPhone and iPad apps to help soldiers struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).