Malcolm Gladwell is a very sharp guy, on a whole lot of topics (heck, he liked my book!). One of the most enjoyable reads of the past month is his point-by-point thrashing of Chris Anderson’s book Free in the New Yorker, which basically established that, all protests to the contrary, charging money is a better business than giving things away for free.

But in the course of this deconstruction, Malcolm made a pretty big arithmetic error that made it sound like Apple was on the verge of making the content it sells for its devices more important than the hardware itself:

“And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both.”

Actually, Apple is really, really far away from making more money selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself. Let’s take the most recent data we have.

As Apple ponders a makeover of some of its stores — the first international remodel is underway in Bluewater (UK) — it’s a good time to consider which of the over 250 retail outlets are worth making a pilgrimage to, or a slight detour if something goes awry while you’re on the road.

The top five must-see Apple stores, as per travel site Jaunted, are London, Tokyo, Sydney, New York — and Scottsdale.

What’s on your list? Let us know in the comments.

Pics and nominations after the jump.

Now, if I worked in a proper office with a bunch of other people, this app would probably have pride of place on my iPhone’s dock.

It’s called Tea Round, and it’s a work of genius. You enter the names of everyone in your office, then simply give it a shake every time the decision is made that a cup of tea is called for.

Tea Round decides whose turn it is, and the named individual must go and make the tea. After all, “Tea Round’s decision is final and legally binding.”

You can even have separate tea rounds for work, home, and anywhere else there might be a need for a group of people to have a cup of tea. Right now the app is free, which makes it almost as awesome as tea itself.

Unfortunately I work alone, at home, and it is always my turn to make the tea. That is both a blessing and a curse.

Just spent two days recovering from a hack attack at Cultofmac.com. The site was a seething cesspit of Viagra spam and — get this – Windows malware.

Looks like hackers compromised an FTP login to our host (a notorious weakspot), allowing the filthy scumbags to inject hidden spam into almost every post we’ve ever published (more than 3,500 articles).

The lowlifes also added a malware redirect to a couple of index.php files. The redirects were located inside hidden iframes, and took a bit of finding. Not sure how these manifested themselves, but they seem to have popped up in the site’s RSS feed. At least one reader seems to have been infected with the System Security 2009 Trojan and the Bloodhood PDF virus — both Windows malware. Sorry Chris!

Luckily, most of you guys are on the Mac, or I’d have a lot more apologising to do.

I’ve spent the last two days downloading the site database, doing a global search/replace to remove the spam and virus links, and the re-uploading the DB.

I changed all the logins/passwords to everything; killed a bunch of old and dodgy-looking accounts on the site and host; and locked down the site with WordPress plugins to prevent brute-force logins and the like.

Amazingly it all seems to have worked, because I’ve no idea what I’m doing.

There may be a few gremlins in the RSS feed. New feeds are working fine, but I’m unable to get my old feeds to update. If you’re having the same problem, just cross your fingers and we’ll all hope together that the problem magically fixes itself tomorrow, especially because I’ve got a major scoop.

Is your MP3 collection maxxing out your iPod, your CD library getting out of hand? If you have $1800 lying around, Olive’s Opus device provides up to 2-terabytes of storage. While not as portable Apple’s handheld devices, the Opus No. 4 stores up to 3,000 CDs in Free Lossless Audio Codec, reportedly providing quality superior to MP3.

The 13 pound unit does include a touch-screen interface and will wireless distribute music to up to 10 rooms via Olive’s MELODY Hi-Fi Multi-Room Player.

[Via Gearlog]

Reports of faulty iPod batteries — from the torched Saab or the recent problems in Korea over Nanos –  are occasionally in the news.

One investigation now claims that Apple lawyers tried to hush-up battery problems that have led to fires.

Amy Clancy at KIRO TV, the CBS affiliate in Seattle, spent seven months trying to obtain documents about iPods from the national Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The delay? Apple lawyers filed “exemption after exemption,” her report says.

She eventually got through the smoke to obtain 800 pages said to be the first comprehensive report into how many iPod batteries go up in smoke, some of them burning their owners.

Those pages contained some 15 incidents of fiery MP3 players, some you can download from the TV site, including a jogger who says she still has a penny-sized burn scar on her chest from wearing an overheated iPod. Apple is said to have told her it was an “isolated incident.”

Out of the millions of iPods sold, are the faulty batteries too few to be significant or  not?

Via ZDnet

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a delighted Macworld audience in January 2007, he said Apple had protected its invention with more than 200 patents.

He didn’t mention that his company had also patented the box the iPhone comes in.

On Tuesday, the U.S. patent office awarded Jobs and 16 other designers a patent for the iPhone’s packaging.

The iPhone’s box certainly is elegant. Pull off the top, and the iPhone is presented to its new owner sitting on a slab of glossy plastic, like an expensive watch. Hidden underneath are its accessories and instructions.

Jobs has always been fascinated by packaging, believing the unboxing routine to be a crucial part of the customer experience. All of Jobs’s products have been carefully packaged going back to the original Mac in 1984. Jobs believes unpacking a product is a great way to introduce unfamiliar technology to the consumer — they explore the components as they unbox them.

The new patent application contains little but pictures of the iPhone packaging. No less that 17 designers are named on the patent, including Apple’s design head designer Jonathan Ive.

Hit the jump for a cool exploded picture of the iPhone package.

Today’s deals include a synthetic leather iPod case for $4, new App Store freebies, Maxtor’s OneTouch 1TB Firewire/USB hard drive and many more.

Details of these and other Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.

Ogle this “mesmerizing” new window display at Apple’s flagship store in Palo Alto featuring billions of iPhone apps flying towards you.

It’s “the coolest window display I’ve ever seen,” says TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid, who filmed the display above.

It is pretty trippy.

A security official has been suspended by Hon Hai Group after the suicide of an employee who lost an iPhone prototype, Bloomberg reports.

Hon Hai Group, one of the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturers, suspended a security official and turned the case over to Chinese authorities, the company said in a statement, but didn’t provide further details.

The security official is identified only by the surname “Gu.”

Last week, Sun Tanyong, a 25-year-old employee at Hon Hai’s Foxconn International Holdings unit committed suicide after losing one of 16 iPhone prototypes he was charged with mailing to Apple in California.

Tanyong leapt to his death off a dormitory at Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzhen. He had reportedly been subject to an illegal search and rough treatment by Foxconn security.

Hon Hai says it is unaware of the reasons behind Sun’s suicide, according to the statement.It offered the company’s condolences to Tanyong’s family.

Apple says it is awaiting the outcome of an investigation.

“We are saddened by the tragic loss of this employee,” spokesman Steve Dowling told Bloomberg. “We require that our suppliers treat all workers with dignity and respect.”

Foxconn is one of the largest contract makers of mobile phones, and produces Apple’s iPhone and iPods at its walled factory city. Home to 270,000 workers, the walled city has its own fire station and hospital, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities. The giant factory also produces cell phones for Nokia and Motorola, Sony Playtation and Nintendo Wii, as well as PCs for Hewlett Packard and Dell.

Link.

Despite worldwide economic recession, Apple enjoyed its best non-holiday quarter ever in its 2009 third quarter ended June 27, 2009, the company said on Tuesday.

Apple made a whopping $1.23 billion profit on revenues of $8.34 billion. The gobs of cash came from robust sales of 2.6 million Mac computers (up 4% from last year thanks to a MacBook refresh in the quarter), and blockbuster sales of the iPhone 3GS, which sold 5.2 million units, up an unbelievable 620% from a year ago.

This when other tech companies companies like Nokia are tanking.

“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs in a statement.

Other highlights:

– the traditional iPod is on the way out. Apple sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, down 7% from a year-ago. The market is saturated and customers are buying iPhones instead.

– Gross margin was an amazing 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. (Dell makes about 5% margins on its products).

– The iPhone 3GS and $99 iPhone are a huge hit. Apple shifted 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, up 626% from a year ago.

– Apple is a truly international. Overseas sales accounted for 44% of the quarter’s revenue. This will jump when the iPhone goes on sale in China later this year.

Apple’s full unaudited financial statement after the jump.

A British thief was busted in Germany after posing as broke tourist selling his iPod and electronics gear to get home.

The sorta-samaritans walked away and realized instead of MP3 players and video gear they had bought a camcorder bag full of potatoes.

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book — buy a cell phone in a parking lot, find out it’s got sand instead of hardware in it — but the thief pulled off the bait and switch at least 26 times.

His accomplice has not been caught yet — and police in Dusseldorf warn he may be armed.
Should someone approach you, remember only Zune owners would sell their devices to get home.

Via The Sun

Are you looking for an alternative to Apple’s in-ear headphones? High-end audio gear maker Klipsch next month will begin selling a $100 headset, the Image S4i, complete with the same three-button microphone and remote as Cupertino’s $88 version.

If you’ve told the kids 100 times not to interrupt while you work in the home office, maybe it’s time to download a new app that emits a high-frequency pitch that anyone under the age of 25 finds seriously annoying.

Called Kids Be Gone, it works like a teen deterrent device first used by British police to disperse unruly underage crowds by emitting a shrill tone only they can hear, 18.000 hz. (Kids and the under-30 crowd still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ears plus full aural capabilities people gradually lose as they age — try the demo for a similar service after the jump).

Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.

On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.

Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.

Today’s deals include a refurbished Apple 8GB iPod touch for $164, an iPod/iPhone FM transmitter, iPhone mirrored screen protector and many more.

Details of these and other Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.

All this Moon landing nostalgia is wonderful and I’m enjoying every minute of it, especially We Choose The Moon and the CAPCOM and EAGLE Twitter accounts — anyway.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you could make it as an astronaut, here’s the ultimate test: Virtual AGC for Mac.

Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.

But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.

BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.

I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.

A CoM reader wrote in after our story on the Apple symbols pried from dead computers and transformed into jewelry to say that he’s been doing the same for years.

The reader, who goes by the handle univac, set up a gallery of what he calls “liberated logos” on Flickr –  there’s something wonderful about seeing the evolution of them side by side.

His collection includes a ton of iconic rainbow Apple symbols (including one possibly from a 512 “Fat Mac,”) plus larger ones from laserwriters, G3s and Quadras.

More pics after the jump.

Another little screencast for you, this time about PersonalBrain, a mind-mapping tool. I recently spent some time exploring this app and found it an odd mix of the infuriating and the fascinating.

The screencast I refer to, about the guy with 100,000 items in his PersonalBrain, is here.

Like I say in the video, PersonalBrain doesn’t really appeal to me; but if you use it, I’d be interested to hear what for, and why you like using it.

If your memory is a little hazy on where to find a medicinal pot supplier, there are a couple of apps for that.

The Cannabis app, available on iTunes for $2.99, helps users locate the nearest medical marijuana collectives, co-ops, doctors, clinics, attorneys, organizations and other patient services in the thirteen states where pot is legal for medicinal purposes.

Cannabis is the work of a Devin Calloway — web engineer and medical cannabis patient and self-described “digital activist” — and software engineer Julian Cain. The pair will donate $0.50 of every app sold to found a cannabis non-profit reform fund.

Cannabis isn’t the only app on iTunes for pot-seeking people. The other cannabis finder is called California Herbal Caregivers and, for $0.99, offers a list of the state’s 700 dispensaries on-the-go.

Despite Apple’s ongoing policing for “inappropriate” apps, both pot apps are rated 12+, or suitable for anyone over the age of 12, for “infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco or drug use references.”

High anxiety, anyone?

What it is: Yet another puzzle game. This time, you drop numbered discs into a grid. If the number matches the amount of discs in its row or column, the disc vanishes. If it’s next to gray blocks, it smashes them. Clear chains for bonuses.

Why it’s good: The evil people behind Drop7 describe it as “Tetris meets Sudoku”, which is kind of right. However, we’d prefer to describe it as “hardcore drugs meets videogaming”, since Drop7 just won’t let go. We find ourselves sneaking quick goes on ‘hardcore’ mode, because they only take a few minutes each, but then an hour flies by and deadlines are standing in front of us, with a concerned, slightly angry expression.

We fully believe that Area/Code actually plans to get everyone hooked on Drop7, shortly before taking over the world and going “mwahahahahahaha!” a lot. Put it this way: we’re now playing this more than Flight Control.

Where to get it: Drop7’s available via the App Store, and there’s more information at the Drop7 website. At the time of writing, the game cost three bucks. Don’t leave home without it—or you’ll get the shakes.

Over the weekend, writer MG Siegler of TechCrunch opened a can of online worms with a furious rant entitled AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure.

Complaining he hasn’t received Visual Voicemail on his iPhone for weeks, Siegler joins a growing chorus of pundits dissatisfied with AT&T, including Gizmodo, Wired and GigaOm.

But as some Techcrunch commenters point out, Visual Voicemail is bolloxed by a popular tethering hack, which allows the iPhone to share its internet connection with a tethered computer.

“I enabled the tethering hack weeks ago when it came out,” says one commenter. “It broke visual voicemail, so I reverted it. One heck of a coincidence if everyone’s voicemail spontaneously broke the same week that a tethering hack came out that breaks visual voicemail.”

Siegler didn’t respond to a query asking if he had tried the tethering hack, and he makes no mention of it in the comments to his post, where he engages in some back and forth with TC readers.

Either way, here’s a very simple fix to get Visual Voicemail back, while still enabling the tethering hack.

The days when you plugged your tiny thumb drive into your Mac may be over; memory maker Kingston Monday unveiled the 256GB DataTraveler 300 — more hard drive space than many desktop or laptop computers.

This thumb drive isn’t meant to transfer a few MP3s or an occasional Word or Excel file. No, the European branch of Kingston reports the DataTraveler has bigger tasks in mind, like 51,000 images or 365 CDs.

“This demonstrates how far flash technology has developed,” Antoine Harb, business development manager for Kingston Technology in the Middle East is quoted. Could this signal Apple a flash memory iMac or MacBook is possible?

Today’s deals include the iLive Portable Boombox with iPod dock for $25, App Store freebies, a refurbished Canon digital camcorder and many more.

Details on these and more Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.