After our recent post about Apple computers held hostage as they were sent to the FDA with documentation as if they were fruit, Susan Rosenberg, a public relations manager at UPS, cleared up the mystery in an email statement to Cult of Mac:

“Apple products are not being associated with fruit for import documentation or clearance. It’s coincidental that UPS groups the FDA and Dept. of Agriculture in the same tracking message as UPS provides detailed real-time visibility of events through our process.

The FDA does have import documentation requirements for low-level radiation-emitting devices with lasers such as CD-Roms or DVD components that are part of most any computer.”

Rosenberg points us to the Food and Drug Administration page about Radiation Emitting Products, where one is reminded that sending electronic products —  including those cell phones, ultrasound diathermy devices or microwave blood warmers you were going to pop in the post — will be inspected.  (Kudos to CoM readers who commented on the previous post that this was the real cause).

So, what are the delays about, then?

We wrap up the week with an assortment of accessories for your iPod or iPhone. From black wood-grained cases to slim fit, several deals are available on ways to house or protect your Apple treasures. We also have an 80 percent discount on iPod touch cases. Software is also on the price-chopping block, ranging from Apple’s iLife ’09 suite for $39 to an iPhone app on Asian painting.

For details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Is Apple taking a more lenient approach to approving App Store developers? After being beaten about the head and shoulders for it penchant to toss violators, the Cupertino, Calif. has approved a number of applications that used private software references. In the latest case, Apple approved iSimulate with only a warning.

“While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate to resolve this issue in your next update,” Apple e-mailed developer Vimov. The problem: iSumulate uses a private API to gain access to the iPhone’s multi-touch and accelerometer features.

Apple Friday sued Nokia, claiming the Finnish cell phone giant infringed 13 patents. The countersuit follows an October lawsuit by Nokia which alleged the Cupertino, Calif. iPhone maker had infringed 10 patents.

“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel and senior vice president in a statement.

Lala, the streaming-music startup Apple recently purchased for a reported $85 million, was just the latest chess piece in a competition between Cupertino and the Internet giant Google. The Mountain View, Calif. company was in “serious discussions” to purchase La La Media prior to Apple’s recent acquisition, according to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper Friday cited insiders with knowledge of the issue.

Although Apple was the victor in that case, Google had earlier paid $750 million for AdMob Inc., a mobile advertising firm that the Cupertino, Calif. based iPod-maker was also pursuing. The two cases reflect a heated competition between the two companies which are butting heads on a number of fronts. In the case of La La, Google wanted a greater piece of the online music pie (an area in which Apple is already well-entrenched) and Cupertino eyed AdMob as a path to greater involvement in advertising, a lucrative area for Google.

Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is increasingly being branded as a gamer’s device, Apple’s never had much truck with gaming… at least in-house. But new calls for a video game artist for the iPhone Gaming Group imply that Apple might be preparing to make a serious push into the gaming market, perhaps to better compete with other handhelds like the Nintendo DS.

Apple’s patents only rarely give us the first look at new products in Cupertino’s pipeline, but they can still be wholesome brain fodder to chew over, as they at least give us a glimpse at the current problems the company is trying to solve. Let’s mull over, then, Apple’s two latest patents, each as different from each other as it can be.

The first patent Apple has applied for is a “technology” that would allow their Geniuses to know when a device has been “compromised” by being opened. It’s not much of a technology: it’s just a little sticker affixed between an electronics component and the chassis’ removable lid. Think of it like Apple’s own iteration of that venerable classic of anatomic technology, the hymen: Open your laptop or iPhone and the sticker will tear in half, thus letting any future delvers know that your device has been sullied.

Clearly, the aim here is to give Apple an excuse to void warranties on modified machines, which is understandable if not entirely welcome.

Inspired (as legend goes) by a piece of pizza with a slice missing, Namco employee Tōru Iwatani first released the classic game Puck-Man to Japanese arcades almost thirty years ago. Later that year, Puck-Man came to the United States by Midway, although wisely renamed with the knowledge of just how tempting it would be to erase just a slight wedge of that first P‘s loop. The rest is history: America’s had Pac-Man fever ever since.

While the classic Pac-Man game has since been expanded into a franchise of quasi-sequels and spin-off titles, what you might not know is that original Pac-Man designer Tōru Iwatani never had any part designing the sequels until 2007, when he was invited by Namco and Microsoft to design a true sequel to his original game. The result was Pac-Man Championship Edition and it was the best Pac-Man games since Ms. Pac-Man. And now it’s available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for $3.99.

The financial crisis may be spurring a few Apple collectors to clean the computer room — after a couple of Apple Is we found on eBay, reader David Fulero tipped us off about this Lisa model up on the block.

She’s up for sale for just $999, a relative bargain if you consider the 26-year-old machine’s original sticker price was about $10,000 — something like $20,000 today.

If you like to game on your Mac, you’ve probably played something released by Aspyr Media. After all, what choice did you have? Aspyr has long been one of the pillars of the wobbly Mac gaming scene, porting over seventy games to OS X, including The Sims, Call of Duty 4, Civilization 4 and Quake 4. Short of restarting into Boot Camp, Aspyr has been the only way for Apple gamers to actually play most of the AAA game releases on their machines.

Sad news for Mac gamers, then. According to gaming site Big Download, Aspyr Media has laid off over fifty percent of its staff, with only a handful of team members now remaining in the office. The layoffs apparently happened weeks ago, but the news has only just gotten out.

Aspyr Media’s business is more than just Mac porting of course: they also port games from consoles to the PC, and recently ported the original Call of Duty to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that their core Mac team members got away unscathed. The Mac gaming scene just got even sparser.

If, like me, your Christmas shopping list has question marks next to two petulant twin nieces whose only interests seem to be quoting popular song lyrics and passages from Twilight on their Facebook pages with infinite, poorly spelled gravity (and who then quickly delete the helpful replies you leave criticizing them for being such idiots without even making a passive effort to absorb the stately, elder wisdom of your words)… well, why not consider buying them an iTunes gift card through Facebook?

Yes, the popular social networking site has just introduced an application that lets you buy iTunes gift cards for other users. The cards come in $5, $10, $15, $25 and $50 denominations, and the interface even allows you to select a date when the gift card should be delivered. The cards come in six designs: two holiday cards, two birthday cards, and two generic cards featuring those psychotropic iPod silhouettes at a rave.

For me, this is actually ideal. My nieces are fifteen years old, and I’ve long since given up on trying to suffer through a sulky, eye-rolling conversation with either of them long enough to try to ascertain their interests. Buying them an iTunes card through Facebook is exactly the sort of impersonal yet convenient gift that I’ve been looking for: it certainly beats this Edward Cullen laptop decal I was planning on getting for them.

Eastgate Systems has just announced Tinderbox 5, a major update to its venerable note-taking application.

“Note-taking” hardly covers it, though. Tinderbox is uniquely flexible and adaptable, in a league of its own when compared with all the other OS X notebooks.

As we approach the two weeks to Christmas mark, yet more deals are on tap. For the budget-conscious, there is a bevy of new MacBooks, starting at $860 for a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo with 13-inch screen. For those preparing to put an iPod under the tree (or in your pocket), there is a 50 percent off sale on iPod nano accessories. To put a bow on all these bargains is a Mac Pro workstation powered by an 8 core 2.26 GHz Xeon processor and 10GB of RAM for $3,577.

For details on these and many more Apple-related items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

A quality infographic is worth a thousand words; by that logic, since GigaOm’s latest infographic breaking down exactly who is getting rich off the iPhone (and by how much) contains roughly exactly that amount of words, it’s actually worth about a million.

Although there’s a lot of fantastic data in the GigaOm infographic, the thing that it makes most explicit is exactly how much money AT&T is making off the iPhone… and exactly how much it has to lose if their exclusivity deal lapses in 2010. According to GigaOm, AT&T actually makes $369 dollars off of the sale of every iPhone. That might not seem like a lot, but it will earn AT&T almost $2 billion dollars over the next two years in monthly data charges on the iPhones sold in the third quarter of 2009 alone.

That’s food for thought. AT&T hasn’t exactly been acting lately like a company about to lose the vaster part of its ill-begotten lucre over the next few years, which is exactly what will happen if its iPhone exclusivity lapses. With the iPhone worth, let’s say, $4 billion a year to AT&T, one wonders exactly how much they’d be willing to pay Apple just to keep control of their bread winner.

Check out out the full infographic at the link below. A lot of sites are just snapping up the entire image and regurgitating it back up locally; that’s not quite fair to the GigaOm guys, so we’re just including a snip of it: you should definitely click through to see the entire thing.

Who Is Getting Rich Off The iPhone [GigaOm]

Although it’s certainly an iconic advertising slogan, I’ve always felt Apple was wise to leave “Think Different” behind as a manta for their Macs.

Poor grammar aside, the slogan is more suited to a small, sprightly underdog weakly jabbing away at a juggernaut, which Apple certainly was back in 1997, but is much less so today. As a slogan, it also has too much of the tell-tale whiff of smugness about it, a problem Apple’s advertising has wrestled with for most of the last decade. “Get a Mac” is better: it’s strong, it’s simple and it is assertive, not self-satisfied.

Still, maybe the old slogan could work in a new context: Apple has applied for a new trademark for “Think Different”…. and it may imply that the vintage slogan will be used to advertise the forthcoming Apple Tablet.

Perhaps with the jeers from selling just 5,000 iPhones during the first days following its launch still echoing in their ears, China Unicom Thursday announced it has sold over 100,000 of Apple’s iconic handsets since Oct. 30. Despite the seeming uptake in interest, experts remain skeptical.

“iPhone sales have been disappointing,” Samsung Securities analyst Paul Wuh told The Wall Street Journal. Selling just 100,000 iPhones with 144 million subscribers won’t help China Unicom’s bottom line, according to the analyst. China Unicom also faces the prospect of competing with its larger rival China Mobile for Apple’s attentions.

Vacuuming is one of those mundane chores that can’t be helped much by listening to your iPod.

The beast whirs and whines over whatever soundtrack you try to stuff into your ears while hoovering over stale cornflakes.

Recognizing this immense problem, Electrolux invented a concept vacuum called the UltraSilencer. It’s so quiet, that you can dock your iPod on the front and built-in speakers on the sides blast your fave whistle-while-you-work tunes. (Perhaps to avoid a lawyer king-of-the-hill match they’ve put some iPod-like MP3 player in the mock-up).

Forehead arteries pulsing dangerously beneath purpling and apocalyptic skin stretched taut, a Microsoft manager recently told journalists not to use or even mention Apple products at a Windows Mobile event in Germany.

Eyeballs bulging out of his skull like the enraged ocular twins of his every spitted umlaut, the manager rebuked a journalist who had dared to opine over dinner that there has never been an easier-to-use smartphone than the iPhone.

“This is a Microsoft event,” the manager shouted. “Apple products have no business being here!”

Panic Software are the makers of some of the finest Mac software out there, including the superb FTP application Transmit, the superlative Usenet program Unison, and the hyperbolically adjectived icon tool, Candybar.

When Panic isn’t applying their peculiar brand of genius to creating the best programs OS X has to offer, they are drafting up hilarious mock histories of their company’s misadventures in the burgeoning Atari 2600 market… replete with gorgeously hallucinogenic cover art for what their apps would have looked like at Atari cartridges back in 1983.

Just days after turning out the lights on its London flagship store, cell phone giant Nokia has shuttered its New York and Chicago stores. The move is described as a “realignment” of marketing and only the latest indication Apple’s retail success isn’t easily replicated.

Nokia discovered consumers used its shops for browsing, but went elsewhere to make purchases. “They would use the stores to test out devices and then go home and buy the device they wanted online through Amazon, Newegg, Dell or even the Nokia USA store,” according to Nokia Experts.

Both stores opened in 2006 with a goal to “educate consumers on the Nokia brand.”

The latest shut-downs follow Nokia’s Regent Street closure in London earlier this week. The store closings are only the most recent sign the iPhone is making greater inroads on Nokia’s territory. Apple shipped 7.04 million iPhones during the September quarter, making it the third-largest smartphone maker behind Nokia and RIM, analysts announced in November. Another blow to Nokia was the news Apple had passed the Finnish giant in profitability.

Once again, AT&T shook their corporate fist menacingly at the bandwidth hogging iPhone kiddies scampering about their 3G lawn, threatening to charge users more if they keep on taking watching streaming video and availing themselves of other high-bandwidth services on their iPhones.

Speaking to attendees at a USB investor conference in New York, AT&T Wirelss CEO Ralph de la Vega said that AT&T was working on improving service in New York and San Francisco, possibly by introducing pricing tiers that would penalize high-bandwidth users.

Needless to say, if you’re under an existing contract, AT&T can’t just move you over to a tiered data contract… but once your existing contract is up, it’s open season.

Apple is exploring moving iTunes to the Web, the latest ripple from the Cupertino, Calif. firm’s purchase of streaming music service Lala, a report said Thursday. The switch, which could come as soon as 2010, would let music fans listen to tunes from a Web browser rather than stored on a personal computer.

The new reports could buttress those suggesting Lala’s aquisition may be part of Apple embracing “cloud computing.” Apple has also made tentative steps toward a Web-based iTunes with its Preview service. iTunes Preview removes the requirement that people have the iTunes software installed in order to preview material.

Google Chrome for Mac arrived yesterday in beta form. The browser is lacking important features, including bookmarks and cookie management, and the useful app mode available in the Windows version. Also, benchmarks show it’s marginally slower than Safari. But in use I’ve found it good enough to set as my default, and Chrome’s superior to Apple’s browser in important ways: it launches more quickly, and is far less taxing on my Mac regarding RAM and processor usage, even with many tabs open.

However, one thing I’m finding irritating is Chrome’s tabs. Google’s efforts elsewhere in making Chrome a Mac-like experience should be applauded—the browser supports Keychain and the Mac OS X dictionary, and there are subtle animations peppered about—but the main toolbar and tabs area is problematic. I spent a short while making a mock-up (see the full-size version on my Flickr page), which offers ideas for a more Mac-like Chrome interface.

UK supermarket giant Tesco has just announced tariffs for iPhone, which will go on sale from the company next Monday (December 14th).

The headline they’ll be using in adverts is that this iPhone is available for as little as £20 per month. Whether you go for a contract or decide to pay-as-you-go, this gets you £60 worth of calls and SMS messages (assuming PAYG customers top up at least £20 per month, which qualifies them for extras – and obviously encourages them to switch to a contract). Also consider that the free credit is applied once a month and only lasts for one month, then automatically expires.

We begged. We pleaded. We begged some more. Steve Jobs finally listened — this morning, Ustream made live streaming from the iPhone a reality (pinch me!) with their Broadcasting app.

Yes, the clouds are finally parting. In the last week or so, there’s been a flurry of activity on the streaming-iPhone front: On November 30th, Fring — a VOIP app that allows users to stream one-way video to another iPhone with Fring installed (turning the iPhone into a one-way videophone) — went live at the App Store. One day later, Knocking Live Video allowed two-way video-iPhone-ing.

Now, Ustream Live Broadcaster lets the iPhone broadcast to a mass audience via the Ustream website — and it’s pretty damn cool. And free. It even works over a 3G connection (albeit a bit wonkily — a friend of mine likened it to a NASA broadcast from the shuttle). And because the iPhone’s camera is on the gadget’s backside, using the little guy to stream to a wide audience makes much more sense than does two-way videophoning with it.

So have the floodgates finally opened? And will the next iPhone, rumored to be in the works, bring major advancements in video conferencing (for instance, a camera that isn’t on its butt)?

[ via TechCrunch ]