When Steve Jobs was asked why Apple was deprecating in-house Java development for OS X, he explained: “Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.”

Yesterday, Apple announced how it planned on passing the Java torch back to Oracle: they would be partnering together for the OpenJDK project to make sure that both Oracle and the open source dev community had the tools they needed to keep Java on the Mac alive past Java SE6.

Ostensibly, Apple’s move to deprecate Java would be good for Mac security, in that users will no longer be forced to wait for Apple to update their home-baked Java when Oracle fixes some security vulnerabilities in their build.

According to Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, though, this may make the Mac even less secure than it was before.

There’s a lot of Mac bundled out there, and they usually all offer pretty incredible deals on Mac software, but let’s face facts: usually, there’s only one or two applications you really want. If those two apps cost less than the asking price of the bundle, and if you were going to buy them anyway, then getting an additional eight apps for free is an obvious win… but what if you’re more ambivalent, or just plain cheap?

Enter MacBundles, which has an interesting new twist on the bundle software concept: the BYOB store. Essentially, this lets you look at their $50 bundle and either buy it all in a go or pick-and-choose the apps you want for $5.95 each… as long as you order a minimum of five.

First there were smartphones, then came the mountains of apps. Now rivals Apple and Google are racing to introduce to iOS and Android the ability to initiate secure mobile transactions via a simple tap of your handset. The latest shot was fired by Google’s CEO Monday, who introduced its tap technology entrant as part of an upcoming update of its Android OS codenamed “Gingerbread.”

Speaking at a conference on Web 2.0 technology, CEO Eric Schmidt said the new Android software would support Near Field Communications, a chip allowing nearby devices to communicate. While a horribly-forgettable name, the technology holds intriguing possibilities for companies seeking to expand the boundaries of mobile commerce. A hint can be seen at your local grocery store, where many payment terminals permit you to simply tap your credit card in order to initiate a transaction.

According to both federal prosecutors and Cupertino itself, former Apple manager Paul Shin Devine was crooked, accepting almost $1 million in kickbacks from accessory makers in exchange for insider knowledge gleaned from his position as Senior Operations Manager of the iPod division.

On his part, Devine says he’s not guilty, but that claim certainly seems disingenuous: not only is he facing 23 counts of money laundering and wire fraud, but when investigators raided his home they discovered over $150,000 in cash squirreled away in shoeboxes.

Now prosecutors are saying that Devine has more, and they want him to open his safety deposit boxes to see if he’s withholding even more money from them.

The case has already had a devastating effect on Devine and his family: although he is currently out on bail, but he was only able to secure the money necessary for release by allowing his mother to put her house up on lien. I really hope he ends up being innocent of the charges: it’s one thing to rip off Apple, but another thing entirely to let your mother risk homelessness to protect you from justice.

When you’re under as much scrutiny as Apple, even the smallest change or briefest of retractions is bound to provoke comment, so it was no surprise that when Apple briefly pulled the Mac OS X Server 10.6.5 update was briefly pulled yesterday, it almost immediately raised questions about what was going on.

Not to fear, though: it’s now back online with a 1.1 version number, available for download from Apple Support or by hitting up Software Update.

Despite the fact that it’s one of the best games the Mac has to offer, we’ve never talked about Minecraft here at Cult of Mac. Let’s remedy that, shall we?

Since the iPad launched, scams luring gullible folks in with mirage of free ones have proliferated almost as fast as the device itself.

Now that desire for Apple’s magical tablet is at its peak — only world peace is slightly more desirable — watch out for the iPad bait-and-switches.

McAfee Labs investigated the top 12 Scams of Christmas — sing along with us now — and the first to put dancing plums over the eyes of eager consumers are iPad scams.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Computer scientist Alan Kay is one of the most foremost experts in computers in schools, and yet he believes technology in education has largely failed.

Kay is a pioneering computer scientist, a former Apple fellow, and famous for formulating the Dynabook concept that predicted laptops and tablets 40 years before they became commonplace. Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the seventies on technologies that Apple later commercialized in the Lisa and Mac. Among many honors, Kay has won the prestigious Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming. During the mid-1980s he was an Apple Fellow at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.

Computers have been in schools for the last 30 years, but with few exceptions, they haven’t been used to their full potential.

Kay says the education system has squandered 30 years of technology in classrooms. He likens the modern factory educatory system to a monkey with a microscope. The monkey looks at its reflection in the microscope’s barrel but doesn’t look through the eyepiece — it utterly misses the point.

Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education. He singles out Guitar Hero as the best example of this — players get the fantasy of virtuoso guitar playing without learning a single note.

“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero,” he said during a keynote speech at CES earlier this year.

We asked Kay to expand on these ideas in this exclusive Q&A. Kay talks about the importance of using technology to create educated voters capable of participating in a democracy, and Apple’s general disinterest in education.

You would imagine Steve Jobs’ home office to resemble Mission Control, with multiple monitors and a big, fancy desk.

But instead it’s surprisingly modest and simple, as revealed in these 2004 photos by famed photographer Diana Walker.

The consensus is that tomorrow’s big announcement isn’t streaming iTunes or anything to do with the cloud, but the Beatles finally coming to iTunes.

Look at the image above (via Techcrunch). Coincidence? Also, The Wall Street Journal and Billboard are reporting that the big announcement tomorrow is the Beatles on iTunes.

Says the WSJ:

Steve Jobs is nearing the end of his long and winding pursuit of the Beatles catalog.

Apple Inc. is preparing to announce that its iTunes Store will soon start carrying music by the Beatles, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would fill in a glaring gap in the collection of the world’s largest music retailer.

Of course, the Beatles-on-iTunes rumor is as old as the hills. It was last aired in the run-up to Apple’s September 1st music-focused media event. Seems every time there’s an Apple event, it’s the Beatles.

We start off another week with a mix of bargains for the Mac fan. First up are several factory-refurbished Apple MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store, starting at $849 for a1.86GHz Core 2 Duo unit with 13.3-inch screen. Also, Handhelditems has a 77 percent discount on various cases for the iPod touch. Finally, AT&T Wireless has several refurbished iPhone 4 handsets, such as a 32GB model.

Along the way, we’ll also check out the latest batch of iPhone app price cuts, including “Harry Potter: Spells.” Additionally, we’ll take a look at another sale on 160GB Apple TV units, iPhone applications and Mac software. As always, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Using your iPad with AT&T? Good news: Ma Bell has just announced that you can now manage your iPad’s account and data plans from any computer with a web browser. Just go here.

That’s good news for people trying to cancel their 3G subscription after they’ve mislaid their iPad at a bar or train station: previously, you could only manage your 3G subscription through the “Cellular Data” settings. God forbid, but better safe than sorry.

Steve Jobs has been on the record for months that he thinks Blu-Ray is a format that is in the process of being murdered by streaming video, so Microsoft’s latest ad taking a jab at the Mac for its lack of Blu-Ray support feels a little limp… but to give credit where its due, the pseudo stop motion animation (which is really CGI) that they are using to make that point is pretty cute.

Mark Papermaster — the former lead of the iPhone hardware team at Apple — unceremoniously left Cupertino five months ago, shortly after the Antennagate debacle… but despite possibly being fired by Steve Jobs himself, Papermaster has managed to land safely on his feet over at Cisco.

Head on over to the official Apple website and you’ll see a new front page teaser.

“Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget,” the copyt reads, before telling visitors to check back with Apple.com tomorrow at 10AM EST / 7AM EST for an exciting new announcement pertaining to iTunes

What the heck could it mean? Our guesses and yours after the jump..

Now that Consumer Reports has deemed pretty much the entire line of Apple notebooks the “Best in Class” in every configuration, it stands to reason you may be seeing more and more of them wherever you go. And not that you’d let your own far enough out of sight to risk its possibly getting mixed up with someone else’s, but there is something to be said for personalizing your Mac. And certainly lots of options exist for doing so — from getting laser etched engravings to getting artful skins to getting brightly colored cases, and more.

Here’s a gallery of a dozen artful, yet subdued decals that make interesting use of the Apple logo and express a bit of whimsy and personality, all of which are available from Etsy. The website has literally thousands of decals to choose from, offered by a wide range of artists, at prices ranging from a couple of bucks to about $15. As always, click on each image for a larger view.

Be sure and let us know in comments about your own favorite decal artists and other outlets for personalizing your Apple gear.

Thanks to an issue with light leaking onto the camera sensor, Apple has delayed the white iPhone 4 until at least March of next year… a nine month delay which probably harbingers the cancellation of that device.

It’s a delay that has bitten some customers harder than others: in fact, some customers have been so desperate to have a white iPhone 4 that they have converted them to white themselves as an aftermarket mod.

Don’t even think about buying or selling an iPhone 4 modded to white on eBay, though: Apple’s coming down hard on “fake” and “counterfeit” white iPhone 4s, banning them from sale on the world’s most popular online auctioning site.

Over in China, Apple hasn’t had much luck in preventing local gadget knockoff artists from aping the iconic appearance of the iPhone in their own handsets. One of Apple’s few victories in this space, in fact, is their recent success in forcing notorious iPhone clone maker Meizu to shutter production.

All’s not cheery for Apple in China, though. Now another Chinese company called Herron Network Information Co. has come along, and they’re suing Apple as well as the Chinese Patent Bureau over Apple’s iPhone patents, which they attempt to characterize as not just overly broad, but “invalid.”

It is widely rumored that when the Mac App Store finally launches early next year, it’ll launch with the iWork ’11 productivity suite available as separately purchasable applications… but could iWork also be delayed to make sure there’s enough time to bake AirPlay support into Keynote?

Maybe. An email from Apple CEO Steve Jobs strongly implies that when iWork ’11 drops, Keynote ’11, at the very least, will support AirPlay functionality.

Worried about Apple’s recent deprecation of Java under OS X, ending Apple’s own line of custom Java packages? Don’t be: Apple and Oracle have just announced that they will be partnering to bring the OpenJDK project to OS X, guaranteeing the continued support of Java on OS X.

Essentially, what the OpenJDK announcement seems to be outlining is a way for Cupertino to pass the torch of Java development under OS X to Oracle. Apple will continue to support Java SE 6 under Snow Leopard and the forthcoming OS X 10.7 Lion, but once Java SE 7 comes out, Java will instead be Oracle’s responsibility to both build and distribute.

Apple reportedly will announce a slate of European partners for its iAds mobile advertising this week. However, the accomplishment has come at a cost for the Cupertino, Calif. company. Along with two delays and some concessions on pricing, the same questions over iAd practices are following Apple from the U.S. to Europe.

The announcement will likely be just that – a rundown of familiar brands such as L’Oréal, Renault and Nestlé. Only two or three actual ad campaigns will launch on the iPhone or iPod touch in December. “Most will not run until next year,” The Financial Times reports.

We reported on Friday that a nasty WiFi bug causing random drops in the gold master build of iOS 4.2 was likely to delay release of the update from anywhere between a few days to the end of the month.

It looks like that report was right: Apple has just dropped a second GM build of iOS 4.2 for the iPad, updating the GM from 8C134 to 8C134b.

Where this puts the official release of iOS 4.2 is anyone’s guess. We’ve previously heard rumors to expect iOS 4.2 to drop tomorrow, but some sources are placing the official release date as far away as November 24th.

Ultimately, what it will all come down to is how much testing Apple thinks the new GM will require for a fix to a single WiFi bug. Taking all bets!

In the meantime, you can download the second GM for developers here.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Launched in 2007, Apple’s iTunes U is a powerhouse of knowledge. Currently more than 800 international universities maintain active sites and the digital library houses some 350,000 free lectures, videos, films and other resources available for download on the iTunes store.

Here are five reasons iTunes U is better than actually going to college. (And we’re only joking a little.)

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

When Newton North High School in Newton, MA was rebuilt recently as a new, state of the art facility, a primary goal was to teach students information literacy using current technology. With a generous budget and the opportunity to start fresh, the result is a school with five Mac-based computing labs, over 130 new iMacs, and a library that rivals one found at many colleges.

It’s enough to make any Apple user envious, and much of the potential is still untapped. “With a lot of this being so new,” says Phil Golando, IT Manager, “we don’t even know all the ways we can use this stuff.”

At the top of our favorite iOS apps list this week is Time Flies – a simple but useful application that helps you keep track of how long it’s been since you last completed a chore or task. It’s now even easier to remember when you last called your parents, bought flowers for your wife, or cleaned the house.

Our second must-have app is a quick and powerful to-do app called SpeedTask. It features a simplistic, easy to use user interface, with free ‘cloud’ syncing that allows you to access your tasks from any device, or sync them with iCal on your Mac.

Also featured this week is the redesigned ReBirth, which is now available on the iPad, emulating the classic Roland TB-303 Bass synth and the Roland TR-808 & 909 drum machines. Making music on your iOS device has never been so powerful!