Could the Genius Bar be going head to head with the Geek Squad in Best Buy stores around the country?

TUAW certainly thinks so, but that seems pretty fishy to me: why would Best Buy agree to juxtapose their own utterly inept and criminally exhortative customer tech organ with Apple’s far classier and fuller serviced one? The Geek Squad can’t come off well in the comparison.

On Apple’s part, though, the move makes a great deal of sense. Genius Bars around the country are already stuffed to the gills with appointments. Short of opening more retail stores, there’s not a lot Apple can do to eliminate he congestion… short of taking advantage of a retail partner’s surplus of big box space.

Clever! We’re interested in seeing how this works out: bringing the Genius Bar experience to Best Buy would certainly be one way to more easily cover more customers.

AppCleaner is a freeware utility for deleting software from your Mac.

The long legal battle between Intel and NVIDIA that has held Apple’s MacBook line of notebooks back from using Intel’s latest Core series processors has finally been resolved, with the chip and graphics maker having just announced a six year cross-licensing deal worth $1.5 billion

Don’t expect the deal to lead to integrated NVIDIA chipsets in future Sandy Bridge based MacBooks, though: NVIDIA says they have no intention of re-entering the chipset market. However, the licensing agreement does give Intel access to NVIDIA’s technologies, which means that Intel might be able to improve their own integrated graphics solutions.

UPDATE: TechCrunch is quite vociferously denying any hanky-panky in this affair. “Hey Cult Of Mac, We Didn’t Photoshop That Deleted Verizon iPhone Tweet,” they say in a new post. TechCrunch notes the original Tweet is still in Google search and that they weren’t the first or only outlet to notice. See here. With apologies for jumping the gun on a bit of a slow news day, we also note TC is likely right that “somebody at Verizon panicked.”

Given the standard pandemonium in Apple-oriented corners of the Internet whenever a special “invite-only press event” is scheduled that might have something to do with the Cupertino company’s products or personnel, it stands to reason a Verizon employee’s tweet from an iPhone on the cellular carrier’s official Twitter account days before the entire tech world expects Verizon to announce it is finally going to start selling iPhones might be seen as a newsworthy event.

But could it also be an opportunity for one of the most widely followed tech blogs on the net to indulge in a bit of traffic-ramping scammery?

It’s time for yet another Monday iPhone App Giveaway brought to you by Appular! This time we’ll be posting delicious app codes on the Cult of Mac Facebook and Twitter pages and it’s up to you to grab them first. We’ll be dropping codes throughout the day so it’s best to Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter so that the codes are immediately delivered to your desktop.

Special Thanks to Appular for helping us put together these app code giveaways! If you’ve got a mobile app that you’d like marketed effectively, contact the good folks at Appular!

Here’s a look at the apps we’re giving away:

We start off the week with three spotlight deals for the iPhone. First up is a new crop of discounted iPhone applications, including “Core,” an Apple-related news tracker. Next is an 8GB iPhone 3GS AT&T is offering for just $49. We wrap things up with a 93 percent discount on select iPhone 4 cases.

Along the way, we’ll also check out a deal on unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $1,019. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

The Verizon iPhone might not be official yet, but AT&T’s already firing an opening salvo in the war of words. Things are about to get nasty folks.

Speaking to Business Insider, AT&T PR head Larry Solomon couldn’t resist commenting upon the prospect of a Verizon iPhone by saying that he wasn’t “sure iPhone users are ready for life in the slow lane,” while noting that AT&T’s GSM-based network is faster than Verizon’s for 3G speeds.

That’s actually not debatable, but for most users, the speed advantages of AT&T’s 3G network are negligible… and my guess is that many customers would be more than happy to give up a few kb/s downstream if they could trade them for Verizon’s coverage and reliability. What do you guys think?

We love Sanho’s line of HyperMac products, which allow you to juice your MacBook or iOS device with an external battery pack… but when Cupertino C&D’ed Sanho over Hypermac for using Apple’s patented MagSafe connectors, the future of the product line seemed in doubt.

We needn’t have worried. A couple of weeks ago, Sanho announced their new line of HyperMac batteries, which use Apple’s own airline adapter to connect to your MacBook via MagSafe, a solution that deftly sidestepped the legal problems.

The only problem with the new HyperMac batteries? While they’ll keep your laptop going, they won’t actually charge them… kind of a bummer.

Luckily, Sanho’s just announced a new HyperMac battery conversion gift that lets you modify your existing MacBook power adapter to not just hook up to your laptop as usual, but also to connect to your external battery. Sanho claims there’s no soldering or complex rewiring required, and that the instructions are easy to follow.

We’ve got a review copy on the way, so we’ll let you know if those boasts pan out, but we’re tentatively excited. The new batteries and the modification kit should be available at the end of the month, with prices starting at just $100.

Apple has released an announcement, via e-mail, that enhancements to iWork.com Apple’s public beta online service for iWork ’09 users have been released.

This announcement came out of the blue regarding a service that has definitely been off the radar for a long time and in beta for longer than I can remember. It’s future isn’t clear considering the pace at which Apple is deploying features on it. Perhaps that will change this year with the rumored release of iWork ’11.

The SoPhone is such a good knockoff of the iPhone 4, it’s making headlines and TV news reports in Hong Kong. Check out this entertaining news segment where the reporter takes the fake to the streets to see if anyone can tell the difference (subtitled):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu1Xj6Ign30&feature=player_embedded

Thanks Chris! The Greatest Fake iPhone 4 Changes Everything Again (video)

South Korean film director Park Chan-wook, known for his fantasy-horror flicks, is planning to hit theaters in his native country in late January with a movie shot entirely using an iPhone 4.

The 30-minute short is called “Paranmanjang,” (that’s a “life full of ups and downs” in Korean) and cost about $130,000 to make.

“From hunting for a film location, shooting auditions, to doing a documentary on the filming process, everything was shot with the iPhone 4,” Park said after the screening. “We went through all the same film-making processes except that the camera was small.”

How much could an iPhone sold through Verizon hurt the iPhone’s current exclusive U.S. carrier? AT&T could lose 6.5 million iPhone sales, one analyst told investors Monday. The Verizon announcement will likely mean AT&T will sell 11 million iPhones this year, instead of 17.5 million of Apple’s smartphone if the Verizon deal didn’t come to fruition.

Those figures, while dire, were deemed “conservative” by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

The numbers have been creeping up in the past year, now new data from comScore shows that Android handsets have surpassed Apple in US market share. Android has captured the second largest share of the smartphone operating system market.

In the three-month period from August to November, Android OS market share shot up 6.4 percent, placing it at 26 percent. In that same period, use of the Apple OS grew by 0.8, leaving it slightly behind at 25 percent.

Google’s Android captured the number two spot among smartphone platforms in November, behind RIM with 33.5 percent, down 4.1 percent in the period studied. Microsoft and Palm made slight losses, ranking fourth and fifth with with 9.0 percent and 3.9 percent respectively.

Samsung is still the top original equipment manufacturer with 24.5 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, up 0.9 percentage points from the three month period ending in August. LG ranked second with 20.9 percent share, followed by Motorola (17.0 percent), RIM (8.8 percent) and Nokia (7.2 percent).

The bump in Android OS users comes at a time of growth in the the smartphone market. Some 61.5 million people in the U.S. now carry smartphones, that figure is up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period.

Interestingly, despite all the killer apps available for smartphones, text messaging remained the most used application. While  67 percent of smartphone owners sent text messages, just 35.3 percent used browsers on their phones, though the percentage increased slightly, up from 34.5 percent.

Source: comScore

Apple is now matching AT&T’s $49 price for the iPhone 3GS, a move taken quietly ahead of Tuesday’s widely-expected announcement that the carrier’s rival, Verizon, will sell the a CDMA version of the iPhone.

When AT&T made the announcement it was cutting $50 off the 3GS (however, still requiring a two-year contract), it pointedly said Apple online and retail stores would continue to set its own price for the device.

As you might expect, the new App Store manages software updates in a manner very similar to the iOS Store you’ll be familiar with if you use an iDevice.

If there are updates available for any of your installed applications, the Updates icon in the toolbar will sport a numbered icon telling you how many, as shown above.

To install the updates, just go to the Updates tab and click the UPDATE button:

During the update, you’ll see a little progress bar in situ, telling you when things are downloading and when they’re installing. If you previously removed the app from your Dock when it installed from the App Store, it won’t be re-added to the Dock by the installation process.

If a Verizon iPhone is announced Tuesday, as a weekend Wall Street Journal report suggests, the move could mean 9 million to 12 million more customers for Apple. However, if the carrier is able to do more than attract existing iPhone owners to switch from AT&T, the Cupertino, Calif. company could gain twice that figure, analysts predict.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said AT&T sold 14.5 million iPhones in 2010, comprising 30 percent of iPhone sales. Verizon should add 5 percent to that figure, Munster said.

The Mac App Store had a pretty big first day, racking up over a million downloads, but that’s more than just a big number for Apple… even successful software companies with proven distribution strategies are being wowed by the sort of numbers they’re seeing.

Take the chart above courtesy of Evernote, the popular virtual notebook and productivity suite. Note what happens to the Mac numbers come the Mac App Store launch day. Holy bejeebus.

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose posted on his blog over the weekend that the iPad 2 is coming as soon as February 1st, and will have a Retina Display. It’s almost enough to make a Mac blogger drown in the same sodium chloride he’s advising his readers to swallow.

Let’s flash back a few months to October, when an iOS developer called Applidium ported the indispensable VLC video player to the App Store as a free download. It was a great day for iOS device owners who wanted a more robust way of watching videos across many different codecs, but one of the lead contributors to the VLC project, Rémi Denis-Courmont, decided to get pissy about it. Why? Because VLC was released under a GPL license, and he felt that Apple wrapping a port of VLC in App Store DRM ran counter to that license.

Well, score a victory for VideoLAN, I guess. Denis-Courmont has successfully had VLC pulled from the App Store in response to a claim that the app violated VideoLAN’s licensing agreement.

Literally. In one of the greatest and most entertaining spectacles at CES 2011, consumers lined up at the Taser booth to get shocked — and I got it all on camera.

See pix of the live Taser demo below.

Apple’s long allowed customers to return or exchange purchases for up to 14 days, no questions asked, but that’s not to say they’ve ever wanted to encourage it: every time you exchange an Apple product, you’re charged a 10% restocking fee for an opened product, which has always seemed a tad miserly and anti-consumer for a company that otherwise so strongly focuses on the customer experience at their retail outlets.

Great news, then. It seems that Apple intends on ditching the 10% restocking fee come Tuesday. They don’t source their assertion, but they seem pretty confident.

It’s not a big deal — unless you’re the sort of person second-guessing a top-of-the-line Mac Pro who has previously had to eat a few bills — but it’s a nice change that should make switching to a Mac for the first time even more painless than it already is.

The Verizon iPhone is a truly exciting prospect for us geeks, for most people, it’s not going to be a big deal. It won’t be an all new phone, or substantially different hardware-wise from the current iPhone 4… it’ll just be on a different network, and that the difference between GSM and CDMA technology is profound just won’t matter to most people.

That puts Verizon in a little bit of a pickle: short of blaring on about how much superior their network is to AT&T’s (and they will do just that), what are they going to do to to easily differentiate the Verizon iPhone from the AT&T iPhone and make it seem like a different product entirely?

According to The Wall Street Journal, they’ll offer unlimited data.

I had originally experimented with the Mac App Store on my desktop computer installing a number of free and paid for applications. Now, I’ve finally gotten around to trying to install the same applications onto my MacBook Air just to see if I could, but I already know that I can. The licensing model of the Mac App Store allows it.

Unfortunately tonight the Mac App Store isn’t working and according to AppleCare there are two suggested ways to work around this that you need to try when the Mac App Store gives you an ambiguous error message: @@errorNum@@.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — The annual Consumer Electronics Show this year was dominated by 3D TVs and Android tabs, but there was still plenty to see for Mac and iOS fans.

As the show wraps up, here’re our picks for the best gear on display in Sin City this year. Most, but not all, is Apple-related.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — If the brief look we stole of the Altec Lansing lineup is anything to go by, we’re going to  be even more thrilled with their hardware this year than we were last year (when their InMotion Compact garnered a 4.5/5 rating). They’ve kept the key ingredients of intriguing-yet-simple design and cool features, but we get the impression everything seems somehow to be more grownup.

A good example is the just-released InMotion Air: An elegant, steel-grey rhomboid that streams music at a distance of up to a whopping 100 yards with the included wireless adapter, or via Bluetooth (at considerably less range); it also comes with a seven-hour battery. The InMotion Air will be available in February for $200, through Radio Shack or online through Altec Lansing.

AL has some additional tricks up its sleeve, which they revealed to us during a closed-door tour of their lineup; we can’t tell you exactly what they’re up to, because we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement just to get inside. But it’s cool, and it’s coming soon.