The iPhone, initially a sideline to Apple’s main Mac sales, could account for up to half of the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s revenue by 2011, according to an analyst. The company is on track to sell 45 to 50 million handsets next year, more than double the 20.7 million iPhones sold in fiscal 2009.

Toni Sacconaghi, analyst with Bernstein Research, in a note to investors, said the iPhone could become 45 percent to 50 percent of Apple’s revenue, up from 30 percent in 2009. The analyst forecasts iPhone sales will reach 40 million to 50 million units in fiscal 2011, a dramatic increase from 20.7 million sold in 2009. The company should report sales of 8.7 million for the first fiscal quarter of 2010, he adds.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune has a mole at the Apple shareholders’ meeting today. Not much to report, other than that Steve is in good spirits and cracking jokes, but there is one piece of pretty huge news: Apple is planning to open 25 stores in China, signs that the company sees a lot of untapped growth potential in Asia, where it currently has a retail presence in Japan and one store in Beijing so far. The iPhone launch has been regarded as disappointing in China, but this could good go some way to changing things.

Inside Apple’s Shareholder Meeting (Apple 2.0)

AT&T’s 3G service may be widely reviled, new data from PC World in collaboration with wireless analysis firm Novarum indicates that not only has Ma Bell done a lot over the course of the last year to shore up thew weaknesses in its network, but that in most cities it’s one of the fastest and most reliable networks around.

A joke so obvious that the humor-bereft Mad TV joke-writing bullpen thought it up two years ago? Sure. Moreover, there’s better reasons to think Apple’s choice of the iPad moniker is a terrible branding mistake.

Even so, you might consider dropping $40 on this iMaxi Apple iPad Case being sold by the Atwoodian Etsy outfit Hip Handmaids… if only because, as a device touched by God, it may very well suffer from the occasional stigmata.

Apple’s update to its professional photography application, Aperture 3, was met with excitement by OS X shutterbugs when it was unceremoniously released on February 16th, but since then, complaints that the program will suck up pretty much all of the free space on your hard drive during the library upgrade process have been widespread.

A new Aperture 3 patch addresses some of the issues that users have been having with the program, including fixes for:

• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Importing libraries from iPhoto
• Importing photos directly from a camera
• Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
• Face recognition processing

Unfortunately, though, Apple is still warning that Aperture 3 may eat up your entire hard drive during the upgrade process, claiming that users experiencing problems need to temporarily shift their library to a different hard drive with more space. Since I’ve talked to some people who’ve seen terrabyte drives fill up completely during the Aperture 3 upgrade process, this isn’t entirely welcome news.

Gamers looking for a solid digital delivery platform on the Mac are notoriously hard up. Actually, scratch that: Mac gamers are notoriously hard up.

The good news here, then, is that recent betas of Valve Software’s popular Steam delivery system contain files that strongly hint that the “App Store for Windows Games” service is coming to OS X. These files are a new “osx.menu” file and graphics for Mac window buttons.

The bad news, unfortunately, is it’s not likely to make much difference: one of the reasons Steam is so great on Windows is because it has tens of thousands of games available for it. The library on the Mac is far more paltry, and OS X gamers are simply better off using Steam through Boot Camp to play the latest games than waiting two to four years for a company to maybe get around to releasing a sloppy OS X port of a game the PC world has already forgotten about.

Steam’s a great service, so I don’t doubt it’ll be useful… but publishers aren’t getting any more serious about OS X as a gaming platform. If you’re not on iPhone OS, Apple gaming is just pretty much dead. The best can be said about this development is that it may indicate that Valve is interested in porting its own games to OS X, all of which require Steam in order to run. Team Fortress 2 or Portal on the Mac is a pretty thought, but hardly likely to revolutionize anything.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Remember Casey Neistat? He and his brother caused a stir back in 2003 with The iPod’s Dirty Secret, a viral video about the iPod’s irreplaceable battery.

Now he’s got a really nice, artful little film about Chatroulette, a web app tha lets you videoconference with random strangers all over the world (hence the roulette). Check it out. It’s well 5.57 minutes of your time.

Reminds me of CU-SeeMe, especially the perverts.

Via Waxy.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gebf8X69tE0

When sinewy-armed Germans Austrians put on some Rammstein, begin to use the word “dude” with abandon and then take a drill to a Powerbook, you just know schiß is about to get extreme.

So what the heck is this? A couple of mean-looking Teutons hack apart a PowerBook and instead of making it into a flame spitting metal dragon or perhaps a battle axe with a special funnel to allow disemboweling juices to sluice out of the handle, they make the wussiest snowboard ever.

It’s just very disappointing. Germany Austria has a long, sometimes ignominious maker’s history of repurposing old metal into some of the most awesome death machines around. These guys, on the other hand, ruin a perfectly good PowerBook, turn it into a snowboard, take it to the slopes and end up displaying all the equilibrium and fluid grace of a toddler pushed off the top of an icy hill while balanced precariously atop a garbage pail lid.

Update: The original post said these guys were German. I, a Berliner, apologize for the inexcusable mistake.

[via Macenstein]

Sure, Apple stuffs the iPhone full of perfectly functional apps before they hit stockrooms. Ok, more-or-less functional. Look, who are we kidding here: Many of the iPhone’s native apps are about as functional as a box of matches; sure, I can get a fire started with it (maybe) — but if I really want to set something ablaze, I’d rather have a butane torch. Or a flamethrower.

Today we go back in time in our way-back machine to the days of G3 iMacs. A number of refurbished oldies-but-goodies lead-off our top deals, including a 500Mhz 15-inch CRT desktop for $39. Also on tap, a new category, App Store titles aimed at children, including Farmer Fred’s Animal Farm learning game. Finally, a plethora of stereo systems for your iPod, including the $29.99 Pixxo MiniBooMX iPad speakers. The system offers an FM tuner, alarm, and plays tunes from your iPod, but no recharging dock.

As always, details on these and many other items, are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura wove old iPods, mice and keyboards into a series of artworks on show at Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo until March 20, Japan Trends reports.

We’ve seen a few artistic reincarnations of defunct iPods but love the way he’s turned that tangle of useless cables we all have in a drawer into something more: the work is intricate enough that it takes awhile to spot the NSFW element in at least one of them.

The iPad’s hardware keyboard dock is the best hope for users looking to do serious writing on Apple’s latest device, but if a picture posted by MacRumors forum-goer macduke is anything to go by, it might also reveal some of the tablet’s still unannounced software capabilities.

Although the iPad keyboard dock is mostly similar to the Apple aluminum keyboard, the function keys have been replaced by various shortcut buttons. From left to right, these keys are: Home, Search, Brightness Down, Brightness Up, Photo Album, Keyboard Toggle, Blank, Skip Back, Play / Pause, Skip Forward, Mute, Volume Up, Volume Down and Lock Screen.

That all seems straight-forward enough, but it’s that Blank key above the 6 that is causing a flurry of speculation. Apple doesn’t leave blank function keys on its laptop keyboards, which the iPad’s keyboard dock is most similar to. Therefore, it seems hard to believe that Apple couldn’t think of a perfectly good use for that key.

Now, the image itself was initially posted over at iLounge, snapped at the January 27th iPad announcement. Is it possible that key is blank so as not to leak some yet-announced feature of the iPad? Say, a dashboard, or perhaps (even better) a multitasking app switch screen? No word from Apple yet… but we should know within a month.

Update: Reader Seth points out that there’s a lot of commentary on this exact same issue over at 9to5Mac.

Despite having just five percent of global PC sales, Apple has 10.5 percent of the revenue, an analyst firm announced Wednesday. For over a half-decade, the Cupertino, Calif. company has been on a steady growth path from just 3 percent in 2004.

“Apple’s pricing discipline in holding Mac prices fairly steady in the face of plunging Windows PC prices translated into dollar share gains that materially exceeded unit share gains,” Needham & Company analyst Charlie Wolf told investors Wednesday.

Thanks to the App Store, the iPhone and iPod Touch have a wide library of frankly excellent remote apps available to most users. If your device can accept commands through WiFi or Bluetooth, the iPhone family is the best universal remote out there… but with most homes filled to the gills with dumb gadgets that can only be controlled by blinking infrared beams, that’s a big “if.”

Power A’s latest product, the iPhone Universal Remote Case, adds the IR functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing it to communicate with any of your household’s stupidest devices. The IR transmitter’s built right into the sleek case, which adds a minimal footprint to your existing device.

Once your handheld’s ensconced, controlling every gadget in your house is as simple as loading Power A’s app, which will even update itself with new device profiles overtime. Not bad indeed… although that $60 price seems a bit much.

Nice that it looks like Apple will give some lucky punter $10,000 in iTunes gift card on Steve Jobs’ birthday.

The counter looks close to reaching the magic number today — remember you can also enter the contest without buying anything here.

Just check to make sure your country is eligible — outside the U.S. about 20 are including Canada (parts), Mexico, Japan Australia and a handful of European countries.

Downloaders seem to be buying at alarming rates, if the ticker is accurate, and all of the top downloaded songs are a lot more recent that seven-year-old iTunes. The top five right now : “I Gotta Feeling” (Black Eyed Peas) followed by “Pokerface” (Lady Gaga) “Boom Boom Pow” (Black Eyed Peas) and “I’m Yours” (Jason Mraz) and “Viva la Vida” (Coldplay).

Via Yahoo

The first generation iPhone’s metallic underbelly was undeniably magnetic to objects like the sharpest ridges of house keys, and in that sense, the current iPhone’s backing is an improvement: the plastic just doesn’t pick up scratches like the metal iPhone backplate used to.

Still, there’s something ghetto about a plastic iPhone, isn’t there? It just doesn’t feel like an Apple product anymore unless it has been hewed out of a piece of aluminum. Martin Schrotz seems to have felt the same way, because he decided to ditch the plastic backplate of his cherished iPhone 3Gs and replace it with a custom titanium body he forged himself.

The process wasn’t without its pitfalls. “I had the original cover measured digitally, and I then started to draw the new cover in CAD. It’s made out of a special titanium alloy that is RF transparent. I had tried aluminum but that was a complete disaster.”

The Apple logo is a bit big for my taste, but otherwise, I’m jealous: my first-generation iPhone has always felt firmer and more substantial in my hand than my girlfriend’s second-gen iPod Touch, but barring Apple restoring the metal-backed option to their iPhone line, this is about the only way in town to marry the performance improvements of Apple’s later handsets with the heft of their first design.

Ladies, gentlemen, please stifle the gasps and shrieks of surprise that the following announcement may well startle out of you. I recommend pushing your first into your mouth until your lips are elastically wrapped around your wrist.

Ready? Good. Prepare for a shock. According to Apple’s latest iPad SDK Beta 3 documantation, the iPad uses Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX Graphics Hardware for its GPU, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I can see by your expressions that you didn’t find his revelation quite as heart-stopping as I thought you might. A steely nerved bunch, I see.

I suppose you’re right, though: iPhone and iPod Touch Apps have been confirmed as being fully backwards compatible with the iPad, despite the latter device’s significantly larger touchscreen display. That implies similar guts. It was probably to be taken as read that Apple, an investor in Imagination Technologies, wasn’t going to go too far afield of the iPhone’s architectural pairing of an ARM-based CPU and a PowerVR SGX GPU.

So not, perhaps, a revelation at all, but this should at least comfort existing app developers, who now know for certain they are working mostly with hardware elements they are familiar with. Even so, Apple warns: “[B]ecause the processor, memory architecture, and screen dimensions are different for iPad, you should always test your code on an iPad device before shipping to ensure performance meets your requirements.”

[via MacRumors]

A new survey out indicates people are still interested in buying an iPad, but possibly not in the same numbers as before the tablet device was a known quantity. The figures seem to echo those released earlier this month showing a drop in demand for the new Apple product after the Cupertino, Calif. company’s public announcement.

The latest survey conducted by ChangeWave Research for RBC Capital says 13 percent of people asked are either very or somewhat likely to purchase an iPad. A September survey by ChangeWave for RBC found demand for an unspecified Apple tablet priced between $500 and $700 at 21 percent.

Over the past few days, Cult of Mac has closely followed Apple’s divisive decision to remove “overtly sexual” apps from the App Store. Some apps caught in the purge (such as videogame Daisy Mae and swimwear retailer Simply Beach) have been reinstated and others have not (notably iWobble). Although some welcome Apple’s puritanical stance, others (including this writer) claim Apple is being hypocritical in allowing Playboy and Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue to remain on the App Store, despite similar (and, in some cases, even less “overtly sexual”) apps being banned.

A developer writes to us and says this might all be academic soon: “Looks like Apple are adding a category called Explicit to the App Store,” he says, providing the following grab:

The developer adds: “It’s available for selection when adding a new app to iTunesConnect although I can’t see any sign of it in the actual App Store yet.”

Update: We’ve since been contacted by two sources that claim the category is gone. However, the information we posted earlier was independently verified by a number of other sources, some of which supplied other images, for example: Macworld, Recombu, 9to5Mac and MacRumors. Either Apple removed the category after it got widely reported after we broke the story or it’s only visible to some developers.

Update 2: The developer who originally contacted us says: “I can confirm that the category has been removed from iTunesConnect. Not sure what Apple was doing!”. Gizmodo corroborates this, quoting a developer who spoke directly to an Apple rep, who said that while the company is considering an explicit category “it’s not going to happen anytime soon”. Then again, knowing Apple’s back-and-forth approach on this subject over the past few days, it may well show up over the weekend. Make up your mind, guys.

Here in Arizona, the general rule is to keep our hands away from anything that sounds like it has even the remotest chance of being prickly or having fangs. Strange then, that my fingers seem magnetically drawn to the triadic snake emblem on the palmrest of Razer’s Orochi Bluetooth mouse. The little sleek black gadget is like crack for my hand.

Apple has quietly reinstated a shopping app from a beachwear retailer that sells bikinis.

As previously reported, Apple pulled the app by Simply Beach, an online beachwear retailer, as part of its great sexy apps purge over the weekend. Among other things, the Simply Beach app sold bikinis.

On Friday, Simply Beach received an email from Apple about the decision to remove any overtly sexual content from the store and that included the Simply Beach application.

“The email also made mention to numerous complaints they had received from customers regarding ‘this type of content’ and implied it was these complaints which had led to the changes,” says the app’s developer, Andrew Long. He added that Simply Beach thought this was a hoax.

A few hours ago, the Simply Beach app was again available on the App Store. Neither Long nor Simply Beach received any communication whatsoever from Apple, Long said in an email.

The same thing seems to have happened with Daisy Mae’s Alien Buffet, a 12+  rated game that was pulled presumably because it features a female lead character in short shorts. Like Simply Beach, the game is quietly back on the App Store. Again, there has been no communication from Apple.

It’s pretty clear that Apple’s doing damage limitation here, reinstating the high-profile apps, although iWobble is still banned.

The mobile porn company Pink Visual calls Apple’s purge of 5,000 or so saucy apps “delusional corporate revisionism.”

The company, whose slogan is “we innovate, you masturbate,” had its “Cutest Girls” app yanked in the App Store purge. Noting that apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated were untouched, the company’s Director of New Business Development, Liam Colins, issued a statement that said:

“Apple has taken their brand control beyond normal standards, and this is one basis of their remarkable success. When they are attempting to control and dictate what is viewed, listened to and utilized by consumers on devices they purchased and pay for monthly, however, it becomes an act of censorship, pure and simple. Mobile porn exists, it is prolific and it is desired by many of Apple’s customers. To pretend that people will not watch porn or seek out sexual content on their iPhone or iPods is delusional corporate revisionism.”

The statement continued:

“The fact that they left Playboy and Sports Illustrated up indicates that this action is not only hypocritical, but that it is based more on corporate strategy than on any deeply felt scruples or actual consumer complaints. Do they seriously expect people to believe that a kid seeking out inappropriate content via the app store would try searching for ‘Sunny Leone’ before searching for ‘Playboy’?”

Apple’s COO Tim Cook was extremely bullish on Apple’s prospects in 2010, in spite of economic gloom and increased competition in phones and PCs.

Speaking to a handful of Wall Street analysts on a Goldman Sachs webcast, Cook predicted the iPad will be a hit and that the Mac will continue to grow, especially in enterprise. And thanks to the recession, Apple will open dozens of “jaw-dropping” new stores this year in prime locations.

Three hardware deals are on tap for today. We start with a $499 deal on 2GHz Mac mini desktops from the Apple Store. (These items seem to be flying off the shelf, so order now, if interested.) Also up: $119 for 16GB iPad nano MP3 players. We round out our top three daily deals with 8GB iPhone 3Gs for $99 from AT&T.

Along the way, we check out the latest batch of App Store price drops, including NBA League Pass Mobile, the ‘Conan Says’ Soundboard for iPhone and iPod touch users, and a $100-off deal on iPhones from Best Buy. As always, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump for details on all of these items.