We start the day with Apple’s new back to school sale. Get a $100 Apple gift card when you buy MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or iMac from the Apple Store for Education. The gift card is a change from last year, when Apple offered a free iPod when you purchased a Mac. The gift card can be applied to the App Stores, iTunes, and the iBookstore. Next is a deal on a 30GB iPod video for just $100. We wrap up the spotlight deals with a 24-inch Cinema Display.

As always, details on these items and more can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

This is not how you make a universal remote for the iPhone.

Apple’s new iTunes Match functionality is an incredible boon to music lovers, effortlessly matching your local music to Apple’s cloud servers, but it doesn’t happen by magic. Instead, iTunes Match is the product of numerous inked deals between Cupertino and music publishers: no deal, and iTunes Match can’t mirror tracks from that label.

So bad news, soul and R&B fans. Numero Group has just vocally drawn a line in the sand: iTunes Match legitimizes piracy, and they won’t be part of it.

Wondering just where in the hell those Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs with Thunderbolt are? Sitting in a warehouse, just waiting for OS X Lion to go gold, according to the most recent report.

Neat spot by Alam van Roemburg: the iCloud icon uses the Golden Ratio, which has been thought since the 16th Century to lead to pleasing, harmonious proportions in aesthetic design.

What do you know? Think Geek has taken their excellent chrome suction joystick for the iPad, shrunk it down and brought it to the iPhone and iPod Touch. $17.99 will buy you one, and while I’ve always thought these miniature controllers were more trouble than they are worth, the iPad version of Joystik-It works pretty well.

If you do a lot of gaming on your iPhone, specifically in games which have a virtual D-Pad, you could do worse than one of these.

Social networking giant Facebook is secretly working on a way to put their own App Store on tens of millions of iOS devices. It’s called Project Spartan, and it’s an aggressive attempt to build an HTML5 front end for all of Facebook’s existing apps on any Apple device, even without Flash installed.

We can all recall the terror-filled moment when we decided to create a home network. Just as two programs to ease the process gain steam, iCloud comes along, and risks making the whole concept of home AV networks obsolete.

If the patent drawing above is anything to go by, Apple is working on a new social experience for the iPhone that will allow irradiated, cycloptic mutants to find out what they have in common with one another even in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Based on the actual wording of the patent, though, it should work for everyone, allowing you to use your iPhone to find the most interesting person in the room, every time.

Google would seemingly be the big winner in the recent announcement that search and maps will bring $3.3 billion in revenue in 2011. Don’t count Apple out, though: the type of video and audio ads iAd excels in is slated to be the fastest-growing area for mobile advertising.

Apple has just erected plywood walls around their iconic Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City, and some massive renovations are about to go down. Could the iconic glass cube be about to go sphere?

Here’s a bit of sweet timing. Just as the PC Era collapses and everyone moves to the cloud, what is Apple selling? Why, the MacBook Air, a light mobile device that seems perfect for the iCloud generation. Oh, yeah, it’s also a “quasi-tablet.” No wonder analysts predict Apple will make billions off the device.

Apple users are embracing the App Economy with abandon. Indeed, by 2015, income from apps will exceed that of iTunes music downloads, one analyst projects.

If you’re going to school in the fall and were anticipating a free iPod Touch along with your new Mac, prepare to feel ripped.

We’ve all done it. Half-way through a marathon browsing session, with 15 tabs open in this window and another 24 open in the window behind, and you tap Command+Q when you intended to just close one tab with Command+W.

Pow! Your browser quits and you have to wait for it to restart and re-load all those tabs again. So. Annoying.

Customers in UK pizza chain Pizza Express can now pay their bills with a Paypal account via an iPhone.

Here’s the handsome new login screen in the update to OS X Lion Developer Preview 4, that Apple released on Wednesday afternoon.

It’s a dark linen motif, and it’s used in several places in the Lion and iOS 5. We got  sneak peek of this color scheme during Steve Jobs’ presentation at WWDC. Now it has been rolled out to developers, and soon to the public. Who’s excited?

Here’s screenshots of some other new stuff in the update (Build number 11A494A). Lion is shaping up nicely:

Earlier this week Microsoft released updates for the Mac versions of Office 2004, 2008, and 2011 that address some issues with security, stability, and reliability. Users of these versions of Microsoft Office are encouraged to update their software.

We’ve all seen the video of Chloe the cute Corgi dog playing with an iPad, but if you haven’t then you need to check it out. I thought it was cool that a cute cuddly dog could enjoy using the iPad touchscreen just as much as I do.

Now the insects of the world want to join the touchscreen party.

Apple has released an update to OS X Lion Developer Preview 4.

Our friends at Adafruit Industries in New York have just released glowing Mac-inspired cufflinks in time for Father’s Day this weekend.

The $128 iCufflinks pulse with the same “breathing” pattern on Apple’s Macs, MacBooks and iMacs. In fact, Adafruit’s Philip Torrone and his crew reverse engineered Apple’s LED pulse pattern.

Here’s some video:

Horse racing event Royal Ascot is really all about the headgear.

These aren’t for the purists: Italian purveyors of witty tees You Need This Sh*t (subtle, eh?) have launched this new collection inspired by the classic Apple logo along with a scatological play on Apple’s slogan “Think Different.”

Review by Kelly Keltner

Before encountering Altec Lansing’s women-specific Bliss Platinum earphones ($70), I had never considered the idea that my ears might be too feminine and precious to handle having a larger earpiece forcibly shoved into their delicate canals. Now I know that, like many things, most earpieces are made for men and we poor, sweet ladies must go about life making do with too-big things. Altec Lansing hopes to solve that issue by giving ultra-precious lady ears a much-needed rest from all the bigness with the Bliss Platinum.

We think it’s a little odd for a company that only makes Apple—related products to label one of said products with the words “Apple Edition.” But that’s what they’re calling the new, slightly different version of their marquis Juice Pack Air iPhone 4 backpack battery.