We start another week of deals with some bargains for your iPhone, your Mac and your iPod. First up is the latest batch of price cuts on select applications from the iTunes App Store, including “SpinArt.” Next is a number of unibody MacBook Pro laptops from the Apple Store, starting at $1,019 for a 2.4GHz model. We wrap up the deal spotlight with a heavy discount on some iPod touch cases.

Along the way, we’ll also check out some cases for your iPad, a charger for your iPhone and a 27-inch LED Cinema Display for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Everyone here is shocked and saddened by the news that Steve Jobs is taking another leave of absence.

Whatever ails him, we hope he is treated successfully and makes a speedy recovery. Our sincerest best wishes go out to him and his family.

However, subtle differences in his two leave-of-abscence letters make us wonder whether things aren’t a little more serious this time around.

Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook is becoming accustom to the role of understudy for CEO Steve Jobs. First in 2004, while Jobs recovered from pancreatic cancer surgery, then in 2009 for six months while Jobs had a liver transplant, and now while his boss takes a medical leave for unspecified reasons.

Little wonder Cook is seen as the top choice to lead Apple, should Jobs’ temporary leave become permanent. “I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the plans we have in place for 2011,” Jobs said earlier today. But will the transition be as smooth as Jobs’ hopes – or will Cook be snapped up by GM, HP, or others?

Over the weekend, some iPad-specific and resolution-doubled icons found in iBooks Version 1.1 made everyone speculate that the iPad 2 would have a 2048 x 1536 display. Not quite Retina, but close enough.

Unfortunately, the speculation breaks down upon closer examination. Not only are the pixel-quadrupled iBook icons old news, but there’s a conflicting mention of a 1536×800 pixel resolution in the same build.

In fact, Apple’s been suggesting that developers provide a double resolution icon for each iPad app since June. This is just Apple thinking forward: yes, they’d like to have the same pixel density in the iPad as in the iPhone and iPod Touch, but that doesn’t make a 10.1-inch Retina Display economically feasible this generation.

In other words, this resolution-doubled iPad icon business? Much ado about nothing. The iPad 2 might have a Retina Display, but not because of a couple of higher res icons.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ Monday morning announcement he is taking a medical leave of absence couldn’t come at a worse time. As in 2009, when Jobs underwent a liver transplant just prior to CES, this episode comes just days before the tech giant announces what many presume will be another gangbuster financial report Wednesday.

As a result of both Jobs’ cryptic announcement and Apple’s legendary tight-lipped PR, investors and observers are left parsing this morning’s short statement. “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can,” Jobs said. However, some take the words as possibly the Apple leader’s swan song.

Late next month, Nintendo is set to release the 3DS, the successor to their popular Nintendo DS handheld console. Besides a few bumped specs, the main selling point of the 3DS is its glasses-free 3D display, which Nintendo hopes will give their latest handheld a leg up on the competition… most importantly by giving them a clear point of differentiation from the DS’s number one competitor, the iPod Touch.

How long will Nintendo have 3D superiority over the Touch, though? Perhaps not as long as Nintendo thinks. A new rumor coming out of Japan suggests that the next iPod Touch will have the same glasses-free 3D display found in the Nintendo 3DS, based upon Cupertino’s multiple patents for 3D related technologies.

A little more than two years after the controversy started, graphics chip maker NVIDIA has agreed to a settlement of Apple, Dell and HP owners who bought laptops with faulty GPUs.

For Apple owners, the settlement covers anyone who purchased a MacBook Pro from May 2007 to September 2008.

You might remember that this generation of MacBook Pro was prone to graphics failure due to faulty NVIDIA chips.

On Apple’s part, they have been extremely good about servicing laptops for free that were affected by the bad NVIDIA chips, covering those laptops even out of warranty for up to three years and issuing refunds to those who paid for repairs.

Now NVIDIA’s doing the same. If you paid for a repair on an Apple notebook computer related to the NVIDIA GPU, you can submit a claim by filling out this form. For a replacement, send in this form.

Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence and handing day-to-day control of Apple over to Tim Cook.

Jobs sent the following message to staff this morning:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

(Sources: Reuters and Business Insider.)

Three new iPad SKUs have been added to the Best Buy store database, leading to questions about what the unreleased products may be. All three are described as “Apple iPad SKU WiFi,” and two are listed at $599, with the third at $699.

The products show up as “unreleased products” on the Best Buy database for both the online and internal store databases, according to 9to5 Mac, who suggests these new listings could be the Verizon iPad + MiFi bundle, new Verizon CDMA iPads, or even the iPad 2.

This week’s must-have iOS apps features Bills – On Your Table HD – a fantastic finance application that helps you manage your money on your iOS device. Bills makes it simple to store and track various types of outgoing payments with specific due dates. The application has been available on the iPhone for some time, but now it’s available in HD for the iPad.

iDarkroom is the latest top photography application for personalizing your snaps. With a wide variety of effects and frames to choose from, it’s easy to make your photos that little bit more priceless.

“The internet, rethought, reinvented, and handcrafted for the iPad,” with Browser+ HD – a feature-packed web browser that claims to be the slickest way to browse the internet on the planet.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps, including Timeli and OMGuitar, after the break!

When will Apple sell its 10 billionth app? Next Friday morning (PST), according to my calculations.

Here’s how I worked it out. We took a screenshot of Apple’s app counter at about 8am on Jan 14th for our first report about the sweepstakes. It showed ~9,775,350,000.

At 8am this morning (Jan 16), it showed ~9,830,422,000. That’s a difference of about 55,072,000 apps in 48 hours, which means apps are being sold at a rate of ~1,147,333 apps an hour. (CNet says Apple is selling 1,000 apps every second, or 1,200,000 apps an hour).

The counter is approximately 170,000,000 apps short of 10 billion. At a rate of ~1,147,333 apps an hour, it would take 148 hours — or 6 days — to hit the 10 billion mark. Hence, early Friday morning.

Now, I’ve flunked math all through my life, and I am in no doubt I’m totally wrong (plus I’ve done a ton of rounding). So please help me out. When will the 10 billionth app be sold?

UPDATE: Reader Allan in the comments reckons it will be Saturday evening PST. Here’s his reasoning: “The counter is running at about four seconds per 1,000 apps (watching the counter), or 15,000 per minute. That’s 900,000 per hour, or 21,600,000 a day. When the counter hits 9.862 billion, there will be 138 million to go. At 21.6 million a day, it will take 551,232 seconds to go another 138 million, or 6.38 days, which is six days and a bit over nine hours. Set your alarms.”

This week’s must-have iOS games features a motocross game that turns a fan-favorite genre on its head and delivers a side-scrolling racer that claims to be like no other game you’ll find in the App Store. Discover what players of the desktop version of Mad Skills Motocross have enjoyed for years.

Sheeple Chase is a loveable little racing game in which your aim is to guide a cute little sheep to victory against his farmyard friends. Enjoy a multi-colored visual feast as you race through the various worlds in a bid to obtain all of the winners cups, while picking up as many juicy apples as you can on the way.

Fans of run-as-far-as-you-can games will love Run Like Hell, the frantically-paced platform game that will have you running, jumping, sliding, climbing and crawling your way to safety as you try to outrun the spear-throwing tribesman.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS games, including Road Blaster and The Blocks Cometh after the break!

Macworld is coming up fast and what better way to get attention than wearing our brand new, limited-edition MILF shirt?

The CultofMac team wore these shirts at CES last week and got a ton of compliments. We’re not exaggerating — everyone noticed this shirt. It’s perfect attire for a tech conference: smart, funny, stylish. And best of all — distinctive.

Available in slimming black and just $22.99, the limited-edition CultofMac MILF t-shirt is printed by Seattle-based MightTees. It’s 100% sweatshop-free. Designed, made, and printed in the USA.

Here are some more pictures:

Chris Chang of MICGadget blog has uncovered a new iPad 2 case with a pair of mysterious new holes.

The new openings are a rectangular slot on the upper right side (when viewing the iPad from the front), opposite the volume rocker and lock; and a smaller, squarer opening on the top of the iPad in the middle.

The makers of the case say it fits the iPad 2 “perfectly,” which means the new device may have capabilities.

Chang guesses that the top opening is for HMDI or mini-HDMI, and the side opening for a SD Card. Engadget on Friday claimed the iPad 2 will have an SD Card slot, although it places the opening on the bottom right of the new iPad, not the side.

Check out more pictures below.

The Multitasker Large bag from Hadaki is an adorable messenger bag suitable for any girl — teen and up.

The bag seems especially  popular with parents who buy them for teenage daughters to take to school. Indeed, my  fourteen-year-old daughter, Nadine, has been using the Multitasker bag at her high school for several weeks.

Weighed down by algebra and biology books this sturdy and stylish bag has held up remarkably well, unlike her poor back!

VoIP service VoxOx thought its rebranding at CES — which includes a massive effort to unify almost every method of communication known to man, and new features like being able to pick your own phone number for free — was such a big deal, they had an army of extras with duct-taped mouths following around an alien who gave away “dozens” (according to VoxOx) of iPhones at the show.

In fact, the PR stunt attracted so much attention it detracted from VoxOx’s actual message about all the neat stuff they’ve bundled into their reworked desktop app, and that they’re well on the way to having an iPhone app out, pending Apple’s approval (and as should be expected, VoxOx says they’ve focused on putting out an iPhone app ahead of any possible Android app).

Here’s the big picture about some of the new features; everything — apart from some outgoing calls — is free:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBvfa4JX3Tw&feature=player_embedded

A new application called HackCentre which allows a user upload any score they want to Game Centre is making its way to the Cydia store. The application supports every Game Centre compatible game available, and is demonstrated in the video above using the popular Fruit Ninja slicing game.

You will, of course, need a jailbroken device to take advantage of this application.

Personally, I really don’t see the point in HackCentre. Whether your device is jailbroken or not, the application takes a lot of the fun out of Game Centre and is only going to discourage people from using the gaming network. If you enjoy trying to beat global high scores and getting your name on the online leaderboards, you’ve got no chance now that hackers can upload any score they want at the touch of a button.

And if you do choose to take advantage of HackCentre and upload your score, surely the novelty wears off when you’ve finished uploading the highest possible score you can for every Game Centre compatible app you own?

I’ll be looking forward to an Apple fix for this one.

UPDATE: It seems my earlier rant about HackCentre was unnecessary, as the hacker behind application has announced on Twitter that he will no longer be releasing it due to the “overwhelmingly negative” response it has received.

UPDATE: The scheduled launch of News Corp.’s iPad app The Daily, referred to in the post below, has been put off — “for weeks, not months” — according to a report by All Things Digital, the Wall Street Journal‘s tech blog, which is owned by News Corp. The launch delay may be related to issues with the recurring subscription functionality of iOS 4.3 (referred to in the post), according to the All Things Digital report.

Apple may be trying to pickpocket subscription revenue from European publishers, according to separate reports issued Friday.

Under new rules regarding publishers’ apps running on iPad, print subscribers to European newspapers will no longer have access to iOS apps allowing them to read content for free on their iPads, according to the reports. By offering free apps to print subscribers, newspapers avoid giving Apple 30% of the revenue they would earn by requiring subscribers to pay for access to content through apps sold in the App Store.

The supposed restrictions come amid speculation over the kinds of subscription functionality the next iteration of iOS firmware may support. The iOS 4.3 beta was seeded to developers this week.

Some believe the next iOS build will permit recurring App Store software subscriptions, a prototype for which could be the rumored joint venture between Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., The Daily , which could be the topic of an event scheduled Jan. 19, at which rumors have Murdoch and Apple CEO Steve Jobs appearing together.

Thus far, no similar complaints have issued from US publishers and it seems strange, at best, Apple would feel entitled either to a cut of publishers’ print subscription revenue or to dictate whether publishers’ had to charge for apps developed for the App Store.

[AppleInsider]

IK Multimedia, makers of the highly-acclaimed tone-modeling app AmpliTube, have released new iOS software bringing legendary Fender sound to musicians playing and recording with Apple mobile devices.

Available as a standalone tone solution or as in-app add-ons to current AmpliTube users, AmpliTube Fender lets iOS mobile rockers dial up tones modeled on a roster of classic pre-CBS amplifiers including the ’59 Bassman LTD and the 1965 Deluxe Reverb and Twin Reverb, as well as the Super-Sonic, and the Pro Junior.

Players can practice using the built-in SpeedTrainer, which allows up to 50 backing tracks — importable directly from the iPod library on the iOS device or from a computer — to be slowed down to half-time or speeded up to double-time with no loss in pitch fidelity. 36 tone presets can be named, saved and called up on the fly, and each step in the tone chain — from stompbox to amp head to cabinet to mic — is individually selectable, with fully operational controls making for a tweaker’s paradise.

We wrap-up another week of deals with a new crop of iPhone App freebies, as well as reduced prices on some iPhone applications. Also in today’s spotlight is several iPads on sale, some $100 below the usual price.

Along the way, we’ll also take a look at some cases for your iPhone 4 and iPhone 3G/3GS, as well as several bargains on Mac software. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Earlier reports this month tipped a January 19th launch for The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad-only newspaper, but it looks like that launch will now be delayed thanks to problems implementing the new iOS subscription API meant to drive The Daily’s business model.

According to All Things D’s sources, Apple and News Corp have made a joint decision to push the launch back to give Cupertino’s engineers enough time to tweak the implementation of the new subscription service.

These paintbrushes by Don Lee seem like an incredible idea. Called the Nomad Brush, each brush’s bristles are made of conductive fibers, so that it’ll work for painting on the iPad with any paint tool app.

I’m not sure I entirely see the point though. The iPad’s touch display can only register ten touch points at once, with none of the granularity that would be required to capture individual bristle strokes, not just brush strokes. Consequently, a lot of the feel and look of painting with a brush will be lost, especially since the iPad’s display doesn’t register pressure: you might as well use any rubber-tipped stylus instead for roughly the same effect.

Ultimately, it seems like whether or not the Nomad Brush is worth the dosh for you is how much more comfortable you are painting than drawing. If that sounds like you, the Nomad should be out in February.

MacBook Pro owner Tommy reports that his 1.5-year-old replacement battery is swelling and that an Apple service rep told him that this is “normal.”

First, nobody seemed to know what to do with me or who I should talk to. Second, while they Apple Customer Representative could look up the age of my computer by the serial number, they had no way of tracking (and “proving the age”) of my battery by its unique serial number. Third, while nearly everybody I talked to seemed to show much concern over this safety issue, the “Senior Customer Representative” who finally spoke to me was quite apathetic about my battery problem. According to him, this issue is normal and the result of wear-and-tear on the battery and, more importantly, this was Apple’s official position.

Since the battery is too old to be covered by Apple’s one-year warranty, the rep refused to replace it. That is, unless it might cause bodily injury or fire.

Apple announced Friday it will reveal its financial report for the first fiscal quarter of 2011 Tuesday, Jan. 18 at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. The conference will likely include some gangbuster numbers, including what was behind a reported 23 percent jump in Mac yearly sales. This at a time when PC demand was off 6.6 percent.

Mac sales, boosted by the introduction of a revamped MacBook Air, is just the lead story in a series of likely wins for the Cupertino, Calif. company. Analysts also predict 2010 was a good year for the iPhone. Thursday, analyst Maynard Um of UBS Securities projected iPhone sales of 15.6 million handsets, up from previous expectations if 14.1 million units.

It may be the New Year, but sadly, it appears that the mere turning-over of the calendar isn’t enough to put a stop to the slate of Foxconn suicides: last Friday, a female engineer leaped from her brother’s 10th floor flat to her death after being insulted by a superior, ordered to quit, then sent to a psychiatric hospital on Foxconn’s orders.

The suicide is the fifteenth so far, although the first Foxconn suicide in 2011.