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.

Could Apple be planning on signing a deal with legendary radio shock jock Howard Stern to exclusively host a new iTunes show? That’s the rumor amongst Sirius investors, and it’s food for thought, if not terribly likely.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is making a bigger splash in the U.S. than even its makers initially predicted. Since its launch two months ago and the Nov. 10 U.S. start, the iPad rival has sold one million devices. Although Apple sold 2 million iPads in its first two months, the Galaxy Tab is the first real competition for the Cupertino, Calif. company.

The new number comes just two weeks after Samsung announced it had sold 600,000 Tabs amd predicted its tablet would sell 1 million units by the end of this year. However, buoyed by holiday sales, the company now is predicting it will sell 1.5 million Galaxy Tabs when 2010 comes to an end.

What it is: MediaPad Pro is fantastically well designed software for the iPad that allows creative people of all types to easily place multiple portfolios of work — including audio, video, still images and websites — onto Apple’s tablet device and present them in professional, fully customized, brand-able fashion to potential clients, agents or patrons, to virtually anyone they’d like to view their work.

iPhoto is one of Apple’s most popular applications. Bundled with every new Mac since 2002, millions of people have imported and manipulated billions of photos with this useful software. Every time you plug your iPhone or another camera into your Mac, iPhoto leaps to the assistance (whether you want it to or not).

With success come challenges. One common thing I’m asked about as an Mac consultant is how to manage iPhoto libraries that have gotten out of hand – thousands of photos, lots of duplicate items, and sometimes multiple copies of libraries. How do you get all this under control?

A small publishing company called Peter Pauper Press today announced an iPad version of a print book called The Little Black Book of Kama Sutra.

The book is part of a continuing series of “Little Black Books” and “Little Pink Books.” Other titles include The Little Black Book of Cocktails and The Little Pink Book of Etiquette.

The Kama Sutra book is very much in line with a growing trend of publishing books as interactive apps instead of as e-books. The only trouble is that the book is sexual in nature and illustrated with photographs. The publisher isn’t even going to try to get it past Apple censors, but instead intends to distribute it independently rather than through the iTunes App Store.

The Kama Sutra puts Apple in an awkward position.

We start out with the MacBook Air. MacMall is offering the 13.3-inch MBA , powered by a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 2GB or RAM and a 120GB hard drive for just $939 – down from the usual $1,499. Also in the spotlight is the latest crop of iPad app price drops, along with some more iPhone app freebies, including “Etch-a-Sketch.”

We’ll also take a look at cases for your iPad, speakers for your iPod and software for your Mac. Like always, details on these and many other products can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Next week’s release of the Unreal 3 Engine based Infinity Blade is likely to set a new graphics milestone for iOS when it’s released next week, but it’s not likely to be the exception: Epic Games have just announced that they will soon release the Unreal Development Kit (or UDK) for iOS to developers, allowing them to use the next-gen Unreal 3 Engine in their games for free.