Feast your eyes on this beautiful gallery of Apple products destroyed in the name of art. The work is by artist Michael Tompert, whose show opens tonight in San Francisco. But you don’t have to be in California to enjoy the pictures. We have all 12 prints — plus detail shots — in the gallery below.

The photo above, called “Breathe,” shows a 2008 MacBook Air shot with a 9mm Heckler & Koch handgun.

Don’t be fooled by the iPad’s thin case and fragile-looking glass screen. It may look vulnerable, but the iPad is nearly indestructible, says an artist who specializes in destroying Apple’s products.

Artist Michael Tompert, who’s first exhibit of Apple-inspired artwork opens today, tried to destroy an iPad by hitting it with a sledgehammer.

“I hit it with a sledgehammer about 10 times,” said Tompert at a preview of his art show, which opens today. “It did nothing. It’s incredible. It was really, really hard to destroy.”

Instead, Tompert took a blowtorch to the iPad.

“I had to blowtorch it for 15 minutes until the inside boiled and it exploded from inside,” said Tompert.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a hands-on kind of guy, but usually, that hands-on approach tends to pop up as dashed-off emails from his iPhone in response to customer queries than telephonic reach-outs.

That’s not to say the latter can’t happen, though: A Seattle-based iPad developer was recently called by His Steveness himself after his app was rejected for using private APIs.

The recent integration of iTunes’ Ping with the Twtter microblogging platform has given Apple’s social music networking service a much needed boost after Facebook pulled integration at the last minute, but man, those Ping URLs are long, ugly and ungainly… an eyesore and an inconvenience in a service that limits messages to 140 characters or less.

Maybe an official iTunes link shortener would help things? MacRumors points out that Apple has owned the iTun.es domain name since December 2006 when it was registered by them under MarkMonitor, Apple’s own domain-registering brand management firm.

Here’s a secret: OS X has a password generator built-in, but many people will never even see it. Here’s how to make it easier to get to.

One thing’s for sure: iOS 4 hasn’t been very kind to iPhone 3G owners. Not only did the major update end up slowing most iPhone 3G devices to a crawl once installed, but iOS 4.x under the iPhone 3G is missing many of the features like multitasking or GameCenter that other devices get to enjoy.

The good news for iPhone 3G users is that the soon-to-be-released iOS 4.2 update supposedly does a lot to improve the 3G’s sluggishness problems. The bad? Apple’s culling yet another promised feature from 3G owners: AirPlay isn’t coming to the iPhone 3G after all.

You might not remember his name, but when you see his pictures, you’ll probably recognise the work of Eadweard Muybridge.

I hope you didn’t jump out of bed at the crack of dawn today, throw open the curtains, crack open a few eggs in the frying pan, connect your iPad to iTunes and then sit down to spend the next few hours to continuously hammer the “Check for Update” button, because we’ve got some bad news for you: it doesn’t look like iOS 4.2 is going to drop today.

Apple’s social network Ping is kind of a lonely kid. The iTunes-based network launched in September has only attracted 2,000 artists.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a big man on the social media campus.   Some 95 million taunts, shout-outs, heads’ up, musings pass through it  every day — and a lot of that noise is about music.

So Twitter has now “friended” Ping in the hopes that it can become more popular.

If you’re an Instapaper user on iOS — and honest to god, you really should be — there’s a sexy new update available that not only contains an impressive algorithm to automatically switch you over to black-on-white dark mode the moment the sun sets outside of your window, but also includes new sharing options, article preview on the iPhone and the ability to use an “ihttps://” prefix to launch pages.

Check out the full change list below the jump.

Publicity stunt? Sure. But that still didn’t stop photographer Jesse Rosten from lighting his latest shoot with nine iPads mounted on several pieces of plywood. Now that’s an Apple-centric strobist!

As a glimpse of the possible gaming future of an iOS-capable AppleTV, this is pretty tops: for the latest update of The Incident, Big Bucket Software has added the ability to hook your iPad up to your HDTV and play the game from your couch using a Bluetooth-paired iPhone as the controller.

If Apple ever introduces an App Store for the AppleTV, this is the way they’re going to do it: in the meantime, we can count on jailbreak developers implementing this sort of functionality in jailbroken AppleTV apps. I can’t wait for someone to get an emulator working on this thing already!

We have just learned that a new patent has confirmed Cult of Mac’s earlier report that Apple is working on ambitious remote computing tech that would allow files and settings to be transferred between the Mac and iPhone through a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip.

Is the writing on the wall for iTunes?

For the first time, U.S. music fans are streaming as much music as they download — and streaming is set to overtake downloading in a matter of months.

NPD Group says 30 percent of U.S. music consumers streamed music in August; the same percentage that downloaded music to their computers.

But streaming is growing fast. In a few months, it will far outstrip downloads, NPD Group spokesman Lee Martin told Evolver.fm.

Incredibly, the new numbers also include downloads from peer-to-peer file sharing networks as well as legal downloads from iTunes and Amazon.

Apparently, the convenience of streaming services, which now offer instant access to vast libraries of music of a wide variety of devices, even beats out piracy!

Good thing Apple has a $1 billion server farm coming online soon (if not already). But when are we going to see streaming from iTunes?

Evolver.fm: Americans Now Stream As Much Music As They Download

Neil Ferguson, developer of Virus Strike, explains how to become a successful iPhone game developer in 10 steps.

I believe that anyone can develop an iPhone game. I recently developed a physics-based puzzler for the iPhone, Virus Strike, on a zero budget despite having zero experience developing iPhone games. It wasn’t easy, but there are very few set-up costs if you have the right skills and approach.

Admittedly, I’m an experienced programmer – I started developing on a BBC Micro at the age of 8 and now work full-time for a software start-up in London. Obviously, my experience helped me when I was developing Virus Strike, but I don’t think you necessarily need to have any programming experience to develop a successful game. Just follow these 10 steps:

Boldly joining the digital age, Danish audio systems manufacturer Bang & Olufsen has introduced the BeoSound 8 portable docking station for all iOS devices.  With their usual brushed aluminum elegance, this Boombox Extraordinaire docks with iPods, iPhones and iPads, and offers a line-in AUX connector and USB port to accept audio input from your Mac or PC.

Consumer Reports infamously loathes the iPhone 4, but if their latest list of computer ratings are anything to go by, that seething distaste doesn’t extend to Apple’s notebooks: not only do they highly recommend most of Cupertino’s current laptops over the competition, but they’re absolutely gaga over the new MacBook Air.

According to Apple, the new A4-powered AppleTV has been a modest success, selling over 250,000 units by mid-October, but despite this, it’s not listed in Amazon.com’s list of the top 100 electronics…. and some people smell a conspiracy.

Macworld may not have an official Apple presence anymore, but Macworld 2011 is shaping up to be one of the biggest years yet for the show when it hits January 26th in San Francisco: according to IDG General Manager Paul Kent, it’ll be over thirty percent bigger than ever before.

Earlier in the week, it was reported that Apple might have acquired Wi-Gear, a company that makes the iMuff line of wireless Bluetooth headphones.

The evidence seemed pretty good for a secret buyout. Not only did Wi-Gear’s home page feature a somewhat unceremonious message about the company ceasing operations and being unable to respond to any press inquiries, but Wi-Gear co-founder moved to Apple as an iOS Bluetooth Engineer.

Unfortunately, like many good rumors, the evidence didn’t add up to the truth of things. Asked about a buyout by Macworld, Wi-Gear CEO Mark Pundsack said: “I wish!”

Right now, if you have Mac OS X 10.6.5 and an iPad running iOS 4.2 GM, AirPrint’s a bit of a mess: some people are reporting that it is working, but many are not having any luck.

We suspected that it was just this sort of compatibility problems that caused Apple to scale AirPrint support back to AirPrint-compatible printers at the last minute, but developer Steven Troughton-Smith has some instructions on how to bring it to your Mac under OS X 10.6.5 and iOS 4.2 GM.

Yesterday, reports suggested that support for Apple’s AirPrint feature had been plucked from iOS 4.2 for shared printers connected to Macs and PCs, leaving only a subset of AirPrint-compatible HP printers mentioned in the official developer documentation.

Has Apple just had last minute compatibility problems they’re not willing to delay their iOS 4.2 update for, or has the AirPrint feature been canceled? Not according to Steve Jobs, but unfortunately, his comments on the matter aren’t particularly illuminating.

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I wear out headphones the way most people wear out socks. Whether from Shure, Ultimate Ears, Sony, Koss, or 99-cent Chinatown bootleg, one of the ears won’t be playing sound within the first three months I own them. Fraying cables, rusty headphone jacks from rain, shorted audio drivers from running-induced ear sweat (?!), and many more have kept me from my music collection. I can’t help it; I wear my headphones everywhere. Consequently, I’m increasingly interested in durability as a key design consideration beyond just audio quality and a comfortable fit.

And I might have finally found the ideal iPhone headset for the active, occasionally irresponsible urbanite: V-Moda’s Vibrato headphones.

If you’ve ever opened your AT&T bill and puzzled for a moment over the “Internet Taxes” heading charge before shrugging and just paying it anyway, good news: you might be eligible to get back a few beans thanks to the palliative magic of class action lawsuits.

TextWrangler is a well-named application. It’s there to do a particular job, and that job is wrangling text.