We start the week with a deal on the MacBook Air. The offer includes a MacBook Air with an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.13GHz. The machine also features a 13.3-inch screen – all for $1,125. There is another iPad stand under the deal spotlights. This one from Keydex also offers a screen protector two-pack along with free shipping. We wrap up the today’s featured deals with the latest crop of freebies from the iPhone App Store, including “Assault Squadron.”

Along the way, we’ll take a look at more hardware deals, such as iMacs and iPod nanos. We’ll also look at accessories for your iPhone and software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other deals can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

A crazy gadget called the Looxcie LX1 sits on your ear like a Bluetooth headset. A built-in video camera records constantly, capturing everything you see.

The video recording and uploading takes place via a phone — until now an Android phone. But now, just in time for Christmas, the company has optimized their product for the iPhone.

The idea behind the $199 Looxcie LX1 is to capture every moment in order to capture any moment. What that means is that the device is constantly recording video, but dumps it continuously unless you choose to save it. In other words, unlike with a convention video camera where you choose to record video before you record it, the Looxie lets you choose to save video after an event occurs.

With the recorder going all the time, you won’t miss that alien abduction, sasquatch sighting or even being run over on the sidewalk by Steve Wozniak’s Segway – or any other sudden event.

To permanently retain footage, you have several options. The easiest is to simply press a button on the Looxcie, which grabs the previous 30 seconds and saves it on your iPhone. You use the app on your iPhone to upload a clip to YouTube, Facebook or send via e-mail. You can also connect to Mac or PC via USB.

The Looxcie LX1 talks to your iPhone via Bluetooth. It weighs 1 ounce, and records video at 480×320 resolution and 15 frames per second. You can get it at BestBuy.

A teenage girl reportedly listening to her iPod survived getting clipped by a freight train in Ohio.

According to police reports, 16-year-old Isatu Kanu was late to school on Friday morning, making her way from home to Olentangy Orange High School at about 10:30 am. She had the hood of her coat up and headphones in, they say.

Police report that train engineers saw the teen and sounded the horn to warn her of the train’s approach. They say she did not appear to react.

Even though the introduction of the iPad-only publicationThe Daily is slated to also herald the coming of iTunes app subscriptions early next year, don’t necessarily expect that move to suddenly make your iPad a digital stand-in for the local newsstand: traditional magazine publishers remain skeptical of Cupertino’s app subscription plan because of the company’s refusal to share credit and billing information.

Just like the Visible Man, Apple used to make transparent Macs with the viscera tightly packed and clearly exposed inside. The idea was to allow Apple’s designers to see and understand how components actually sat inside a Mac before the case was attached and the beige slapped on.

These transparent Macs were super rare: only ten are known to exist. One such transparent Mac SE was recently put up on eBay with a rather aggressive reserve price of $25,000.00.

Apple continues to gobble up worldwide market share thanks to the popularity of the iPad, but limited content offerings in local languages are a speed bump.

Apple snared a 12.4% share of global mobile PC shipments in Q3’10 – taking the third spot worldwide behind HP and Acer, according to DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report

Still, early adopters in places like Japan are not snapping up the tablet, in part due to the lack of content in Japanese.

I have a bet for my pinky finger with a certain man from the south that Apple will never release the white iPhone 4.

What’s the point? After long delays caused by light leaking onto the camera sensor, the white iPhone 4 has been delayed nearly nine months… and the next-gen iPhone is, at best, due out a mere three months after the white iPhone 4 is set to debut. At that point, anyone who wants one is going to just wait for a white iPhone 5.

I’d always assumed Apple was just hoping that delaying it until spring of 2011 would just get everyone to forget about the white iPhone 4, but their latest official signage at Apple Stores around the country reminds people that the albino iPhone 4 is still coming.

Crap. Maybe I’m about to lose that pinky bet after all.

Sales deals on Apple products are precious occurrences, as spontaneous and rare as the collision of matter and antimatter localized entirely on the Grand Concourse Parkway in the Bronx. Sure, you can get a buck or two off at some of the big boxes; you may be able to weasel a fin out of Amazon, but ultimately, Apple’s MSRP is an immutable law.

So this is exciting: the iPhone 4’s first honest-to-goodness sale at a physical and reputable retailer. Effective as of Friday, if you sign up for an AT&T contract at one of Radio Shack’s stores (new or upgrade), you can get an iPhone for $50 off the retail price. That’s $249 for the 32GB iPhone 4 (usually $299), $149 for the 16GB iPhone 4 (usually $199) and $49 for the 8GB iPhone 3GS (usually $99).

Remember all the chatter about a year ago that iPhone pricing separated Apple and Verizon? Well, it seems the carrier has moved closer to Apple’s thinking, spurring by a desire to block T-Mobile USA or Sprint from obtaining the popular handset, according to an analyst Monday.

Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu told clients he is “picking up that iPhone economics to Apple are likely to be favorable, similar to that offered by AT&T.” Apparently, Verizon “may be willing to pay for exclusivity to itself and AT&T,” Wu writes.

The latest MacBooks (including the Pro and the new Airs) have been understandably criticized for their anachronistic adherence to Intel’s last-gen Core 2 Duo CPU when competing notebooks have all moved on to the superior Arrandale architecture.

There’s a good reason for that, though: a lawsuit between Intel and GPU maker NVIDIA that prevents the latter company from making chipsets for current-gen Intel CPUs that include an NVIDIA memory controller. That lawsuit may be on the cusp of being resolved.

There are many good ways to promote your product or service. Here at Cult of Mac, we’re particularly taken with people prancing around in animal costumes, then being hit in slow-motion by a barrage of baseballs while the product’s name flashes on the screen. Advertising’s not so hard after all.

Of course, not every advertiser is so inventive, and so there is a lesser school of guerilla advertising: destroying a beautiful and expensive gadget in a web video in lurid, torture porn detail, then directing viewers to a stupid, countdown and uninformative website that the viewer will forget the second it fails to illuminate.

In this case, the site in question is Say Hi To Space, and while the video is beautifully produced and an industrial drill a novel way to destroy an iPad, one can’t help but feel that the iPad’s lack of a camera is just a slight-of-hand justification for the iPad’s destruction… one that will ultimately lead us to a website that has nothing to do whatsoever with Apple or its products.

Apple intends on using the 100 acres of land they purchased for $300 million from HP last month to build a partially domed, green-friendly campus with an intensive subterranean road and transportation network, according to a recent report by a Spanish paper… and they’ve already hired the visionary architect to make the futuristic, utopian campus city happen.

Apple reportedly wants to launch its Mac App Store Dec. 13, in time for Christmas shopping and ahead of schedule. Although CEO Steve jobs would have liked to have the App Store already up and running, “that’s obviously didn’t happen,” according to the report.

Citing an unnamed source, the report suggests the Dec. 13 date is meant to “take advantage of the Christmas rush.”The Cupertino, Calif. company told developers should have their apps ready. Last week, Apple released another beta of OS X 10.6.6 containing “developer support for fetching and renewing App Store receipts.”

Back in September, there was a general uproar online when a PowerPoint “Fuck List” created by a 2010 Duke graduate went viral. The list provided a detailed evaluation of each of the woman’s encounters

Now, it appears, two bored Pacific Heights, San Francisco stay-at-home moms have one-upped that low-tech mechanism and created an iPhone version of the idea.

The New York teenager who made a small fortune making white iPhone 4s has shut down his website.

“We have closed the site, possibly permanently,” said Lam, 17, in an email to CultofMac.com.

It’s not clear why Lam shut the whiteiPhone4now.com website down. He didn’t elaborate. But Apple is the obvious suspect. Lam has already received a threatening letter from a private investigator representing Apple, who accused Lam of “selling stolen goods.”

Lam reportedly earned more than $130,000 delivering white iPhone 4s using grey market parts.

Thanks to the number-crunchers and graphics staff at Mobclix we see a nice representation of iPhone’s participation in the Great Holiday Recovery of 2010.

Consumers’ credit-card spending returned to “pre-recession levels” this year on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), traditionally considered the start of the Holiday Shopping season, and overall spending activity saw double-digit increases over 2009.

As reported earlier this week by First Data, overall consumer spending activity at the shopping season’s kickoff has much improved over last year, sparked by aggressive marketing that lured value-conscious consumers to post a 10.1% increase in transaction volume — and it looks like Apple iPhone users played a large role in hitting that number.

Interestingly, the consumer electronics category fared poorly and was down -6.7% compared to last year. The First Data report speculated that consumers may be holding out for lower prices on electronics later in the holiday season.

We end the week with a blast from the past: a PowerMac G4 with a blazing-fast (at the time) 450MHz processor – just $70. Also on tap: Apple has 10 iMacs for sale, including an 22-inch i3 for $1,019. To wrap up the spotlight deals: 180 free iPhone, iPad or iPod touch app downloads.

Along the way, we’ll look at more iPhone apps, cases for your iPad, bumpers for your iPhone 4 and software for your Mac. Like always, details on these and much more can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

If you’ve ever wondered how well your Mac performs — against its peers, against similar models, against the latest releases from Cupertino — Primate Labs’ Geekbench might be worth a look.

Geekbench is free software that, as the company states, “provides a comprehensive set of benchmarks engineered to quickly and accurately measure processor and memory performance.”

The baseline score of 1000 that Geekbench uses to help compare performance among Macs is the score a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz would receive. Higher scores indicate better performance.

It’s also worth noting that benchmarks only measure processor and memory performance which is why, for example, MacBook and MacBook Pro scores are so similar, despite both having radically different graphics adapters.

Check out their periodically updated chart on the web and take a peek under the hood of your own machine.

Mophie’s back with another Juice Pack, this time meant to both charge and ensconce your iPhone 4, while simultaneously protecting it from drops and guarding the antenna from finger-induced signal attenuation.

When the Mac App Store launches, it’ll have the same dichotomy that the iOS App Store has: free apps and paid apps. Don’t expect Apple to use the launching of the Mac App Store to finally introduce a new demo category, though… Apple is now telling developers that they will not accept demos, trials or betas for Mac App Store review.

According to a new posting on their Developer News Portal, Apple will only accept feature complete versions of apps, saying:

Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.

It’s a strange move for Apple to make. Surely, insisting that developers host demo and trial versions of their apps simply means that Apple is going to risk losing out on money generated by customers who want to try before they buy. If a customer downloads a demo from the software maker’s website, surely he’ll go directly back to that website — or click a link inside the software itself going to the website — which means Apple will miss out on its 30% commission.

Moreover, in saying that developers can’t submit trial, demo or beta versions of their software, Apple’s Mac App Store Review Team is still leaving a loop hole open for developers to submit Lite versions of their apps, a la iOS, which are demos in their own right. So what’s the point?

[via MacStories]

Although rumors often cast him as an apoplectic, purple-faced tyrant stamping through his Cupertino headquarters, Apple’s Steve Jobs is the most beloved of any major tech CEO by his employees, according to a Silicon Valley Insider chart.

Ranked by his own employees, His Steveness hovers at the 95% mark as far as employee approval ratings go, relegating the naysayers as a small minority of malcontents.

Beatle mania continues on iTunes: after the Fab Four launched on Apple’s store, selling some two million downloads in the first week, a course about them on iTunes U is also soaring in popularity.

Liberal Studies class “The Beatles: Popular Music and Society” from the University of Illinois Springfield has been available on iTunes in podcast form since 2005, but just this week it came in as the second most popular course on iTunes U. (Number one? Oxford’s “Critical Reasoning for Beginners.”)

Half a million people have downloaded the 39 podcasts – a crash course in 1960s music for people not born when John Lennon was killed in 1980? — and another two million have previewed it.

A high school basketball coach used an iPhone app called PhoneAid to perform CPR on a 17-year-old who collapsed on the court.

Eric Cooper Sr. downloaded the $1.99 app just the night before, as kind of a refresher course. When Xavier Jones keeled over in the middle of the court, Cooper and the assistant coach rushed to his side.

Jones’ heart had stopped beating. Cooper used the iPhone app, which gives real-time instructions on how to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to jump start his heart.

The share of Internet-connected devices powered by Apple’s iOS platform grew 216 percent in November, compared to a year ago, researchers at NetApplications announced Friday. The iOS operating system, which powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod, accounts for 1.36 percent of Internet traffic, leading Android’s 0.31 percent.

Although more PCs are online than mobile devices, the shift to portable Internet products is noticeable in the new NetApplications numbers. Windows’ share is down 1.8 percent to 90.81 percent, compared to 92.52 percent during the same period in 2009. The portion of Macs connected to the Internet fell the same percentage (1.8), pulling Apple desktops to just 5.12 percent of the share of online devices.

If you want to get rid of the number pad on your iMac desktop, you now have no choice but to go wireless: Apple has quietly discontinued its compact wired keyboard, making either the $69 Apple Wireless Keyboard and the $49 Apple Keyboard With Numeric Keypad the only (official) keyboards in town.

The compact wired keyboard — part number MB869LL/A — was introduced in early 2009 with the new iMac revision. Neither it nor its wireless brother (which came in the same design, albeit without the compact wired keyboard’s two USB ports) have ever been my style: I’ve never been able to grow accustomed to the lack or miniaturization of some important keys, let alone the omission of the number pad.

Still, if you like keeping your desktop as compact as possible but don’t like changing batteries on your keyboard, it’s a bit of a blow. Better stock up: Amazon’s still selling the old wired keyboard for $49.