Companies within Apple’s supply chain are currently preparing materials for the production of the iPhone 5, which they believe is likely to launch this September… but it may not be launching alone. Instead, it will be accompanied by the iPad 3.

iPhone apps are live streaming the trial of a mother accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter.

Casey Anthony, 25, is standing trial in Orange County, Florida on a charge of first-degree murder. Her 2-year-old daughter Caylee’s disappearance in the summer of 2008 became a national obsession.

A series of interviews with retail employees conducted by a labor movement website paints a scathing picture of what it’s like to work at the Apple Store: underpaid, demoralized, physically drained and with no way to secure full-time benefits without turning your personal life over to Apple.

City commissioners in a Florida town approved iPads for themselves to save money on paper costs despite budget problems.

The expense of $2,916 was approved for four iPads despite a cash crunch. Last year, Coral Springs dipped into reserves for $4.8 million plus raised fees and property taxes to carry on.

Following rumors that Facebook was planning its first iPad app, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told everyone to stay tuned for the world’s largest social network to ‘launch something awesome next week.”

A senior manager at Research In Motion, utterly embarrassed by the travesty that was the BlackBerry Playbook, has published a public plea to the press. Stop selling Flash. Look at how Apple is working its mobile business. And fire those two joined-at-the-hip bozos running the company.

Today’s June 30th. That’s an important day for app developers. It’s the day Apple expects app makers to comply with new guidelines saying you can no longer link directly to a way to buy in-app content out of app. Hulu Plus has already jumped through that hoop, but you know who hasn’t? Amazon with its Kindle app.

HP will be releasing its own would-be iPad killer on Friday. Called the HP Touchpad, it’s the first tablet running webOS 3, the tablet-sized operating system HP picked up from Palm last year. But what is the critical consensus? Is the HP Touchpad a viable competitor to the iPad?

Across the board, the answer is no, but most critics agree that six months from now, webOS 3 — if not the Touchpad itself — could be a viable threat to iPad. Right now, though, the HP Touchpad is unpolished and messy.

Here’s the only review of the HP Touchpad you need, glommed together from the Internet’s gadget blogging hivemind.

Apps, those tiny games and other bits of code on your iPhone or iPad, are adding up to serious money. After doubling to $14.1 billion this year, revenue from apps will generate more than $36.7 billion by 2015. But can web apps cash-in on this goldmine?

Apple — not Android — has the momentum in the United States, a new study finds, and their powerhouse move was the Verizon iPhone, which flattened domestic Android growth.

One of Windows 8’s key tablet features is the ability to run two apps on the same screen side-by-side. It’s a feature that iOS 5 has yet to adopt, but that hasn’t stopped one jailbreak dev from swiping the idea and creating a hack that can allow two or more iPhone apps to run side-by-side on any iPad. Sick.

Sync versus streaming. Essentially, that is the difference between how Apple, Amazon and Google view the cloud. However, a closer looks finds iCloud could pay off big for the Cupertino, Calif. company looking to cash-in on the falling price of flash memory.

Are iPad component makers too busy fulfilling Apple orders to build any competitors? That’s appears to be the case for Amazon, where at least one parts maker may already be too busy churning out iPad displays to build a tablet version of the Kindle.

It’s not official until Apple makes it so, but expect this blip to pop up Apple’s July 19th financial results call: the iPad now has more than 100,000 native apps available for it.

Apple’s currently in the process of sprucing up their New York retail locations, most notably taking down and reinstalling the 5th Avenue Store’s iconic Glass Cube. But the slate of renovations won’t end there: Apple will also close its landmark SoHo store this summer and replace it with a temp location somewhere else within Manhattan to compensate.

We know the release of OS X Lion is imminent, not just because Apple said it was coming in July, but because supplies of MacBook Airs and MacBooks are dangerously constrained, yet Apple is holding back new models.

So when’s Lion dropping? The latest rumor says right after this holiday weekend… and we’re inclined to believe it.

As if on cue, the first teardowns of Apple’s Thunderbolt cable have hit the Internet, and prepare to be surprised: that $49 retail price isn’t just the usual Apple tax, but a fair asking price for the advanced circuitry within!

A 23-year-old man was arrested for using the iPod video camera to film up the skirts of women at a local Walmart.

A 9-year-old girl with sight problems has swapped out magnifying glasses and other clunky equipment for  an iPad.

Holly Bligh, of Melbourne Australia, has albinism, which affects her vision. To read, teachers had to make photocopies with enlarged text for her or she had to use a magnifying glass or other devices to read.

We start out with two hardware deals and an offer to protect your MacBook Air. First up is a number of Mac mini desktops, beginning with a 2.4 GHz unit for just $599. Next is several MacBook Pros, starting at $899 for a 2.4GHz unit with a 13.3-inch screen. Finally, there is a MacBook Air sleeve from Belkin for just $13.

Along the way, we also check out a Bluetooth keyboard case for your iPhone 4, a micro SIM card for your iPad or iPhone and “Brush Pilot 2” for the Mac. As always, details on these items and many more can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the release of the original iPhone, and for Cult of Mac’s writers, it’s a particularly important birthday: not only does June 29th mark the anniversary of one of our most all-time beloved gadgets, but it’s also a day so momentous that it has rippled through every aspect of our professional lives as both Apple fans and writers.

To mark the occasion, five of Cult of Mac’s writers got together to talk about where we were when the first iPhone came out, what it meant for us then and what it means for us now. Check out our stories, then please feel free to hop in and leave a comment telling us where you were when the iPhone was born.

The folks over at Yanko Design put together these extremely attractive mock-ups of what they imagine the next iPhone might look like when it’s released in September.

There’s a lot of truth in these Organizational Charts for various tech companies from Bonkers World.

Via Laughing Squid

Will the venerable white MacBook become a victim come Apple’s Mac OS X ‘Lion’ upgrade? Experts are calling ‘unusual’ constrained availability of the $999 MacBook in both the U.S., Europe and online, and with the $999 MacBook Air Apple’s new entry-level bread winner, some wonder if Apple will kill off the plastic MacBook line once and for all.

Four years ago today, after having announced the pregnancy six months before, Apple finally gave the first iPhone to the world… and changed the mobile landscape forever. There’s much serious beard stroking to be done about the ramifications of that epochal birth on the smartphone industry as a whole, and we’ll do some of that later today, but right now we’d rather throw the iPhone a birthday bash… and what better way to do that than to serve up a nice slice of birthday cake?

As you know, making and frosting cakes in the shape of the iPhone has become quite a movement in the baking world since the iPhone’s debut. It’s probably a little creepy to serve up an iPhone-shaped cake at the iPhone’s own party —how would you like to eat a big, frosted slice out of yourself on your birthday? — but let’s not think it through too much. Here’s four years of the best iPhone birthday cakes we could find. Dig in!