It may be difficult with reports and rumors of a tablet whizzing by your eyes every day, but one analyst is bullish on Apple’s original product: the Mac. With 3.1 million Macs expected to be sold during the December quarter, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told investors Tuesday morning, 2010 is “The Year of the Mac.”

Munster said sales of Macs during the December period tracked by retail research firm NPD Group rose 26 percent compared to the previous year, topping the Wall Street consensus of 19 percent. The jump in expected annual growth prompted the analyst to estimate 3.1 million Macs were sold during the previous quarter, an increase from his previously-predicted 2.9 million Mac sales. If that figure holds up, it would beat the 3.05 million in Mac sales, Apple’s previous high water mark.

If Apple unveils a tablet Jan. 27, publisher HarperCollins may also be in the spotlight, according to a Tuesday report. Apple is talking with HarperCollins and other publishers about making ‘enhanced ebooks’ available on its much-expected and long-rumored tablet device.

Citing anonymous “people familiar with the situation,” the Wall Street Journal reports enhanced ebooks with video, interviews and social-networking connections, could command up to $19.99 per title – far from the $9.99 price for Amazon’s Kindle.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was suddenly bewitched by the heavenly tones of a siren’s call radiating from the single speaker inside my favorite Starbucks. I was enraptured, overwhelmed with the sudden desire to find out to whom these dulcet tones belonged! Gripped in a fever of curiosity, I quizzed the barista, but — tragedy! She didn’t know! Would I never find the answer?

After I calmed down a bit, I realized, like everything else, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are two — one of which is truly outstanding.

Oh Groupon, you bring us such wonderful deals with your hyper local bulk buying business strategy. And today, of all days, you tell me I can pick up Macworld tix at incredible discounts? Tell me more.

Check out the San Francisco Groupon site for $10 3-Day General Admission tickets to the Macworld 2010 Expo $25 value). They also have Macworld Users Conference tickets for $50 ($105 value).

Groupon is like a woot! for events and services. Apparently they offer unbeatable deal a day in 30 cities across the U.S. They do group buys so they can offer tickets to events or spa certificates or car washes for a hefty discount. The discount is only good if they get enough people to sign up, which for this deal happened at 9am EST so you’re good to go.

We’re at it again, bringing freebies to your Facebook world. Put down that virtual hoe (Farmville) or ho (Mafia Wars) and post a picture of your dirty keyboard on our wall!

We’ll pick 5 random pictures of dirty keyboards posted to our Facebook Page to win an iSkin ProTouch anti-bacterial cover for your MacBook (Pro/Air) or full size aluminum keyboard. So take a picture of your keyboard in all of it’s coffee stained, pizza grease, sugar sticky glory and upload it to Facebook for a chance at improving your chances at staying flu free this year. Be sure to include which type of keyboard cover (MacBook Pro-Air or full size aluminum) you want when you post your photo.

Contest starts immediately and ends at 3 pm PST tomorrow, January 19th.

Since late 2008, John Kooistra has been masterminding an intergalactic war—inside your iPhone. The reds and blues have been engaged in a deadly struggle, as evidenced in twist-based shooter Blue Defense and its more involved sequel Blue Attack.

Red Conquest is John’s most advanced and innovative game yet, a complex, exciting RTS that takes full advantage of Apple’s hardware. Cult of Mac interviewed John about how he got into iPhone games development and how the latest game in the red/blue saga came to be.

The Apple Tablet is coming, and if our own tipsters are anything to go by, the UI will require a “steep learning curve” and a complex vocabulary of new gestures. We won’t know for sure what to expect until Steve Jobs sends his fingers dancing across the tablet’s slate-like surface on January 27th, but until then, Patently Apple has hit the US Patent Office archives, prophesying what we can expect.

Kotaku, of all places, is reporting that they have received their invitation for Apple’s January 27th event. The Loop has also received an identical invitation. Leander presumably has one rattling around in his mailbox as well.

“Come see our latest creation,” the invite reads, superimposed over a multi-chromatic palette paintgun-like spatterings.

No surprises here. From the colorful splotches of e-ink to the mention of a “latest creation,” that invite all but confirms the January 27th unveiling of the Apple Tablet. All we need to do now is wait for Steve Jobs to pull it out on stage, give it a name and spell out the details.

Over 2,000 workers in the Chinese city of Suzhou went on strike last week after persistent rumors circled that their employers, Taiwan-based Wintek Corp, would not pay a promised productivity bonus for 2009. They certainly seem to have earned that bonus: the workers build the touchscreens used in Apple’s iPhone, only the most popular and bestselling smartphone on Earth.

According to reports, the workers are outraged, flipping vehicles and damaging facilities in protest. Needless to say, production has halted in the meantime.

It’s hard to imagine this is going to go well for the workers. If conditions at Wintek’s factories are anything like those at Foxxconn’s iPod facilities, most of Wintek’s employees earn less than fifty dollars a month, and work 15 hours a day. They’ve doubtlessly earned whatever meager bonus is being held back. It’s easy to understand their frustration. Too bad the Chinese government isn’t the sort to look favorably upon worker rebellion.

We start off the week with new deals on MacBook Pro computers, more juice for your iPhone or iPod touch, and your own collection of classic reading material for free. The Apple Store has nearly two dozen MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $999 for a 2.26GHz 13″ unibody MacBook Pro. Are you looking for a convenient way to boost your iPhone’s talk or music time? The Morphie JuicePack lets you have 250 hours of standby or 24 hours of music for just $66. Finally, have you wanted to build your library of classic literature but don’t have the bucks, or the space? We have a deal you can’t beat: 112 titles, including Wizard of Oz, Little Women and Frankenstein, for free from the iTunes Store.

Along the way, we look at ways to conserve your computing energy, connect faster, hear better and become a comfier couch potato. As always, details on these and many more bargains can be found after the jump.

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Digg founder Kevin Rose has become an investor of the Square iPhone payment system (which was in turn created by another social networking visionary, Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), and so he’s posted an informative video tour of the technology on YouTube.

Next week, Apple will either officially unveil their much-rumored tablet device, or the lot of us are going to look like complete idiots. Either way, it should be a fun week, but as anticipation boils to a pitch, we might as well keep ourselves entertained with a look back at the prehistory of Apple’s last tablet launch: three Newton prototypes evocatively codenamed the Bic, the Cadillac and the Batmobile.

Like a modern-day Hatfield and McCoys, Apple and Nokia are at it again, the latest shot fired by the Cupertino, Calif. firm, asking the International Trade Commission to block imports of the cell phone giant. The legal action comes after Nokia asked the same commission to ban imports of iPods, iPhones and Macs.

The action was posted on the ITC Web site without any comment from Apple. Nokia, however, said it will “study the complaint when it is received and continue to defend itself vigorously,” Nokia spokesman Mark Durrant told Bloomberg by text message over the weekend.

A year ago, I took a month’s vacation and enjoyed the coral, sugar cane and sunshine of the small island nation of Mauritius. My days were spent drinking rum cocktails out of a dodo’s skull, my serendipity only occasionally interrupted by a small, translucent lizard darting across my ankle. On the other hand, the evenings were more dire, and largely spent waking fearfully every fifteen minutes only to discover several dozen small centipedes slowly skittering towards my bed, thirsty for eye jelly. No matter what time it was, the Internet sucked: although 3G was ubiquitous, the island’s internet was supplied by a single, badly oversaturated cable strung from Madagascar.

In other words, even in tropical paradise, there’s some horrors lurking unseen beneath the surface. The Mauritian iPhone sit rep is more proof for that supposition: while telecom Orange is indeed selling the iPhone in Mauritius, there’s no Mauritian App Store, leaving all local iPhone customers in the lurch.

Could Apple unveil a touch-enabled iMac this year? While many have viewed the touch-based iPhone and highly-expected tablet as two discrete products, the Cupertino, Calif. company may produce a “22-inch touch-enabled all-in-one PC” in 2010, according to a Chinese report.

Digitimes, citing the Commercial Times, report, suggests the 22-inch desktop computer would fill a gap between Apple’s current 21.5-inch and 27-inch non-touch iMacs. HP and others already produce touch-based PCs.

According to the report, Apple has already outsourced the touch-screen panels to a Taiwan-based company, Sintek Photronic. The reported move by Apple is seen as part of the company’s evolving line of devices, embedding touchscreen technology in all of its products.

Apple is expected to announce a new product next week, possibly its highly-rumored tablet. For weeks, speculation has surrounded Jan. 27 as a date when the company will roll-out a tablet, new iPhone or iPhone OS 4.0 software. Two days prior, on Jan. 25, Apple is expected to release its financial performance for the first quarter of 2010.

[Via Business Insider, Digitimes]

Nowadays, you can’t launch a mobile device without an accompanying app store. Right after the iPhone, Apple launched its App Store – the same for Nokia, RIM, Android and others. In a sort of Marshall McLuhanesqe moment, the app – not the device – will soon become all important.

“Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry and applications themselves will help determine the winner among device platforms,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director for Gartner. Indeed, consumers will spend $6.2 billion in mobile application stores this year, racking up 4.5 billion downloads in 2010.

Google’s Chrome Operating System is a Google’s answer to Mac OS X or Windows 7  — a lightweight operating system designed for netbooks and other portable devices. It’s also designed for an always-on connection. The Net is as much a part of the system as the software installed on the computer.

It’s also lightweight, fast, and easy to use. Boot up in just a matter of few seconds, log in and get onto the internet instantly. No distractions at all. Moreover, everything remains in  the cloud so you never have to worry about running out of the disk space.

It’s also fun to play with. Here’s how to install it on a Mac using Parallels Desktop 5 virtualization software. Be aware that Chrome OS is currently in pre-alpha developmental stage. Install at your own risk!

CoM reader Paul sent us these pics of his office where the IT department shoots hoops on a backboard with an Apple logo.

After the cardboard backboard from the Nerf caved in under one too many slam dunks, Paul had a brainwave:

“As we were scrapping an old PowerMac G5 for parts, I realized that we could recycle the door to become our new heavy  backboard.  Two short screws were used to attach the plastic bracket to the door and another two longer ones to go into the concrete pillar in the office wall.”

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Users of Mac OS X are spoilt for choice when it comes to notepad apps. We have dozens of text editors and word processors to choose from. There are more browsers than we can shake a collective stick at.

But email clients? Well, there’s not so many of those. And one developer, Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame, says he’d like to see at least one more.

People think Texans own the whole “bigger-is-better” thing. But just look at the size of Canada — yeah, Canadians know a thing or two about big. No surprise then, that it’s a gang from Canada who are trying to squeeze billboard-sized images from the iPhone’s wee 3mp sensor.

Yelp is kinda like that know-it-all friend who collects all those old Macs and watches Dr. Who obsessively: full of obnoxious, sarcastic comments, but more precious than gold when information is needed.

Those who don’t yet have Yelp on their iPhones, go get the free app now. It’s ok — we’ll wait.

Sometimes, you can just punch and punch and punch a guy until he’s squirting gray matter out of his tear ducts and he just won’t stay down. Psystar’s that guy. Though meatily pounded into a puddle of pulsating goo by Apple’s lawyers, the Florida-based Hackintosh makers have officially filed a notice of appeal in order to revoke the injunction made against them, prohibiting them from selling hardware with Apple’s operating system pre-installed.

Lower the pitchforks, everyone. A mere day after everyone’s favorite hirsute, technosexual bear became widely vilified on Mac blogs for claiming that the HTC Nexus One was his new favorite gadget, the Woz has clarified matters to Gizmodo:

Actually, everyone got it wrong. My favorite phones are my iPhones. When asked what my favorite gadgets were I took it to mean new gadgets I was playing with (that I considered good). I am not a switcher but I’m not going to tell people that the Nexus One is not a good gadget. Same for the Droid. I continually buy and play with new hot gadgets because I gets asked about them all the time. I have had prior Android phones that I didn’t consider good. I usually have between 2 and 6 different cell phones on me, more when there are interesting product introductions.

I try mainly to make good comments but I’m honest about flaws too. I don’t get into arguments trying to claim that there are objective reasons that make one person’s phone better than another’s. It’s subjective. You can’t win such arguments, only have a stressful life doing so. I have no problem praising and learning from non-Apple products as well as Apple products, when they are good.

Okay, Woz, we’re placated for now. Just don’t let it happen again.

Makers of quirky, charming and Mac game makers nonpareil Popcap Games are having a fantastic deal: buy a game (or, for that matter, twelve) from them and all the money will go to Haitian earthquake relief.

The deal’s good for today only, but there’s no shortage of great Popcap games to choose from, including Bejeweled 2, Bookworm, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies and Zuma’s Revenge.

What a wonderful gesture on behalf of Popcap. Let’s hope they can translate the money from my purchase of Plants vs. Zombies into enough medical supplies to prevent some poor Haitian for becoming the latter.

Opening tonight in Brooklyn — an art exhibit based on obsolete Apple technology that examines the “fetishizing” of products that are soon discarded.

The installations include a mechanical interpretation of Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, and a doormat with Bill Gates’ face on it.

See the video and several pix after the jump.