Cult of Mac

Apple stock rose above the $300 per share mark Wednesday morning, reaching a historic level. The Cupertino, Calif. company, which has been on a recent tear, now has a market capitalization worth around $275 billion. A poll of financial analysts put the Wall Street consensus at $350 per share.

Last week, we reported Apple is nearing the market value of Exxon-Mobile, the most largest company in history. Exxon-Mobile closed Tuesday with a market value of $329.44. Monday, Oct. 18, Apple is expected to announce record sales for the fourth-quarter, the first full-quarter for the iPhone 4.

Why is Apple supposedly providing South Korean customers refurbished iPhones instead of new handsets when the device breaks? That will be the central question when the Cupertino, Calif. company faces that nation’s legislators. Just days after expected record-breaking iPhone sales are to be announced, the company must answer the Korean parliament October 21.

At issue is Apple’s reported tendency to issue refurbished units when responding to repairs, a move appearing to depart from its stated repair and replacement policy. Farrel Farhoudi, Apple’s senior iPhone service director, is scheduled to take the hot seat. Farhoudi, also the former AppleCare Business Development, has been with the Cupertino, Calif. firm since 1993.

Will the iPad hurt PC sales? Chipmaking giant Intel thinks Apple’s tablet will “probably” make some consumers turn away from purchasing PCs. However, CEO Paul Otellini took the tact that the iPad’s waves will make all boats rise. “Apple has done a wonderful job reinventing the category,” he told analysts.

“Consumers will have a limited amount of discretionary income and some will choose to purchase a tablet instead of upgrading an existing PC or purchasing a netbook,” Otellini said.

On Thursday, we’ll be publishing an exclusive interview with ex-Apple CEO John Sculley. It’s the first time Sculley has talked publicly about Steve Jobs since he was forced out of Apple in 1993.

In the interview, Sculley reveals the secrets of Jobs’ methodology, and a few surprises:

SAN FRANCISCO — Hanging out at the big CTIA cell phone convention last week, I ran into an old friend who used to work at Apple and is now a wireless consultant.

He argues that if Verizon is getting the iPhone, it won’t be until summer 2011 at the earliest. There’s two reasons why, he says:

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg74pDVek8

This looks cute: Evac is an upcoming pixel block maze game incorporating elements from games as diverse as Pac-Man to Splinter Cell. Your job is to guide a cheery moppet of a pink square through a maze while dodging red guards by any means necessary: from stealthing past them, to trapping them, to outright vaporizing them.

It looks fantastic, and sounds even better thanks to a captivating soundtrack by Kubatko. It should be available on the iPhone and iPad sometime next month.

I’m still not entirely sure what I think about Google Instant, Google’s new search-as-you-type feature that updates your page with search results in real-time, but I do love the Chrome browser, so I guess I’ll have to get used to the new behavior of Chrome’s Omnibar, which now has Google Instant baked right in.

Remember that report that leaked Monday, in which 1,736 surveyed Foxconn employees detailed management transgressions including lying about pay raises to both workers and the media, enslaving interns and management physically beating their employees?

Foxconn’s responded to the allegations, “categorically reject[ing]” the findings and saying that their 937,000 employees all work in a “safe and positive environment.”

If you’ve got the money, you might want to buy any Apple products you’ve got your eye on now: starting next month, all of Apple’s products might get a price jump as their manufacturing partner Foxconn prepares to charge Cupertino more to make their gadgets.

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Alright, couch potatoes… set your TiVos to start recording on Thursday, October 14th at 9:00PM ET. That’s the time you can expect the second episode of Bloomberg Game Changers to air, focusing on Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Microsoft’s mobile devices have never been able to easily sync with Macs, and never through first-party tools, but with Windows Phone 7, Microsoft aims to change all that with a native OS X application that will allow for syncing content between your Mac and Windows Phone 7 handset.

The tool isn’t out now, but Microsoft is promising the application later this year, presumably before the holiday shopping season.

Microsoft can’t be happy about having to do this, but what choice do they have? iOS has a three year lead on Windows Phone 7, and Microsoft wants people to give up their iPhones and iPads for their new operating system… which means appealing directly to Mac owners. They want people to switch, and the kind of people who are going to need good reason to switch are, by very definition, not loyal to the Windows brand.

One of the last bastions of iPhone exclusivity in Europe has finally tumbled: Vodafone and O2 are now reporting that they will soon be offering the iPhone 4 in Germany, breaking the knuckles of T-Mobile’s long standing stranglehold on the handset.

It was pretty easy to see the writing on the wall in Germany that this was coming: earlier this year, T-Mobile’s “exclusivity” was downgraded from the exclusive right to sell all Apple handsets to the exclusive right to sell the iPhone 4. Pretty much every carrier in Germany has been offering the 3GS ever since.

Rockstars and musicians have ideas of their own when it comes to proper decorum. Invite them to perform at a party and they are just as likely to lay down an obscenity-laced, hip-hop style roll call of everyone who has ever showed them disrespect.

That’s why it just seems so darling that Apple is trying to get artists to conform to a nine page list of guidelines if they plan to use Ping, the social network no one really wants or needs.

It’s two days late, but late is better than never. GreenPois0n the jailbreak for iOS devices running iOS 4.1 is here. Unfortunately the first release is for Windows and Linux only, but the developers of the hack, Chronic-Dev, expect to release a version for Mac OS X soon.

The jailbreak supports iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, the third and forth generation iPod touch, and the iPad. Although it doesn’t presently support the second generation Apple TV at this time a future update will fix that.

The release of GreenPois0n follows last weekends surprise release of Limera1n by Geohot. Afterwards, Geohot and Chronic-Dev got together, so GreenPois0n now uses the same exploit as Limera1n. This cooperation saved Chronic-Dev’s SHAtter exploit for a future jailbreaking tool.

As far as I’m concerned the hacker cooperation can continue. I appreciate what they do for people who want out of Apple’s walled garden and I hope they continue to work together on future iOS hacking tools. You can download a copy of GreenPois0n for Windows or Linux by visiting www.greenpois0n.com.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicted this week that Apple will eventually lose its early tablet lead to Google. Munster is very bullish on tablets and pessimistic about the prospects for netbooks and laptops. “The tablet is undeniably going to be the winning category in mobile computing over the next decade,” he said.

But ultimately Apple won’t be able to maintain the lead in tablets, according to Munster.

My own prediction is that Munster is correct about Android — if he is talking about the global market. But in the United States, I predict that Apple will maintain its tablet lead indefinitely. Here’s why.

(Read the rest on IT World)

If you use Posterous for posting stuff online, you might be interested in the new, free Posterous iOS app that’s popped up in the App Store today.

It’s got everything you’d expect to see in a mobile blogging tool. Namely: a big green POST button that’s everywhere in the app; no matter what else you’re looking at, you can always start a new post with one tap.

The Amazon iPhone app received an update Tuesday, allowing iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 users to scan barcodes anywhere and instantly compare prices on the scanned item at amazon.com.

Using the device’s camera, users of the free app can point at a barcode out in brick-and-mortar land and know within seconds whether Amazon has a better deal on offer.

As if its frenetically gleeful yellow and purple icon wasn’t enough enticement to download, yesterday saw Yahoo make its free Yahoo Messenger app even more appealing with some beefy upgrades: backgrounding, voice calling and the biggie, video calling.

We tested it briefly and found the video calling works pretty well over wifi, even with a 3GS — though, obviously, the person on the other end won’t see a face unless the 3GS is turned around — with decent transmission of both voice and picture. But the app suffers from a few issues, which fellow Cultist David Martin will reveal in a full review later this week.

While voice and video calls will only work between users of the app, Yahoo also yesterday added the Skype-like ability to make voice calls (including international calls) to landlines or mobiles at low fees via a Yahoo Voice Phone Out account.

Apple released a 3rd beta build for iOS 4.2 on Tuesday, along with a 2nd for iTunes 10.1. It looks as though new builds are coming at roughly two week intervals at this point.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of an iPad artist, you might like to grab yourself one or two of these Stylus Socks, now on sale for five dollars a pop on etsy.

Slip one of these socks over any pen or stylus-shaped object, and you’ll be able to use it to paint directly on your iDevice screen as if it were a paint brush.

They’re made of MedTex130, a “conductive knit fabric for use in e-textiles”. You can do all sorts of fun things with it.

Seller Ivo Beckers told me: “When the material arrived last week, I gave it to my daughter Esmée (10) who likes to sew clothes and bears with her aunt Esther. I gave them a Koh-i-noor pen holder as well for the fitting and they did a great job. It fits perfectly around the pen holder’s top and works amazingly smooth as a stylus for the iPad.”

With pudgy poodles and tubby tabbies becoming the norm in the US, an iPhone app promises to help keep pet calorie counts under control.

Called CUPetHealth, the $3.99 app was developed by a team of seven computer science students at Cornell as part of a class project and vetted by the university’s veterinary experts for accuracy.

The app is meant to take the guess work out of feeding for the household’s four-legged companions. After entering the daily diet and noting several lifestyle variables to determine the appropriate number of calories each day, the app responds with “overfeeding,” “underfeeding” or “appropriate.” The app also keeps track of medication and vaccine and flea control information.

Apple has been awarded a patent for filtering objectionable text messages, better known as sexting.

The new patent, “Text-based communication control for personal communication device,” was granted on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent Office.

It describes an intelligent control unit or app that filters text messages if they contain “objectionable” content.

Designed to give parents more control over their children’s’ text messages, the system can also be set up to check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If kids grades are dropping at school, parents can block messages unless they are grammatical and free of spelling errors. Likewise, the sytem can check for foreign language words, so if the child is suposed to learning Spanish, it will only send messages that contain a minimum number of Spanish words.

Who said Apple has authoritarian tendencies?

Via iSmashiPhone. Thanks Mike!

This new TV commercial for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 inspired me to write a script for this weekend’s Saturday Night Live. No, really!

WEEKEND UPDATE SEGMENT
Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler

SETH

Microsoft this week unveiled its long awaited Windows Phone 7 to compete with the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones. The company also released a TV commercial depicting a world of people so engrossed in their cell phones that they fail in their jobs, neglect their kids and ignore the sexual advances of their spouses. To which people in the commercial respond: “Really!?!”

Which brings us to a segment we like to call, “REALLY!?! with Seth & Amy.”

<Applause>

UPDATED: Added a quote form Vince Tseng, SquareTrade’s VP of marketing.

Following up on our story about Glassgate last week, an iPhone insurance company says the iPhone 4 is significantly more prone to damage than the previous model. But it also found little evidence that Glassgate is a widespread problem.

We start off with three hardware deals. The first comes from the Apple Store, which is offering a number of MacBook Pros, starting at $1,019 for a 2.4GHz unibody model. We also take a look at a growing product segment – iPad cases. This time it is a crystal jelly skin with a dot-wave pattern – just $4. We wrap up our deal spotlight with more Mac minis from the Apple Store, including a 2GHz Core 2 Duo model for $499.

Along the way, we’ll also check out more cases, software and other items for your iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.