Erratic behavior with the glass trackpad on new Mac notebooks appears to be a growing concern for some Apple customers. A buyer emailed Steve Jobs over the weekend complaining the trackpad on his new MacBook Pro was not registering physical clicks consistently and received a telephone response from Apple support indicating the company is investigating the matter, according to a report today at AppleInsider.

A survey of the discussion forums on the Apple website indicates nearly 100 threads have been opened in the past week on the subject of “trackpad problem” for the new unibody aluminum notebooks, with most users complaining the trackpad does not always register a click when it should, while some also report the pad loses all functionality at its outer edges, and several believe the sensitivity of the trackpad leads to erratic, unpredictable behavior.

With any new product there is bound to be something of a learning curve while users become familiar with its capabilities, and the new trackpads certainly have been designed to support a wide range of two, three, and four-finger gestures that could be causing some users confusion and frustration.

I asked my colleague Pete Mortensen, who wrote glowingly about his new MacBook a couple of weeks ago, how he’s finding life with the new trackpad. “I actually do get some of those issues some of the time – not always, but sometimes,” he says, noting, “it’s worst in the bottom edge dead center. Moving up a little or millimeters to the side fixes it.”

How about you, dear reader? Have you found the new trackpads quirky? And if so, do you think it’s something you’ll get used to, or does Apple have a production issue on its hands?

I asked Pete if the trackpad behavior made him long for his 12″ PowerBook G4 and he replied, “I don’t miss my 12″ G4 at all!”

Apple may have cut by 40 percent fourth quarter production of its flagship iPhone handset, a Friedman, Billings, Ramsey analyst said Monday.

The drop in production would be far deeper than the 10 percent cut previously anticipated.

“Our new checks indicate that iPhone production could fall more than 40 percent sequentially in the 4Q,” FBR’s Craig Berger wrote in a note to clients.

The drop in production shouldn’t be interpreted as a dip in iPhone demand. In October, Apple reported shipping 6.9 million iPhones during the third quarter.

However, the lowered production may signal “no market segment will be spared in this global downturn,” wrote Berger.

Image credit: Josh Helfferich

Back in October, blogger John Gruber wrote off the Apple Retail Store Field Trip program for K-12 schools, calling the taint of education with consumer advertising “sickening” and “appalling.”

Over the weekend, however, Fraser Spiers, a teacher in the UK, posted an account of the field trip his class took to an Apple Store across the pond that makes Gruber’s dismissal seem mean and wrong.

According to Spiers’ account, “The teacher in charge considered that the lesson had been very well designed from an educational perspective and was very appropriate for the age and stage the children were at.” Students were provided a half dozen computers in the store and given instruction on making podcasts in GarageBand, including using Photo Booth to add chapter artwork and burning the CD in iTunes. At the end of the trip each student came away with a CD of their finished podcast and a free t-shirt.

While it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical about corporate interests getting too closely involved in education, Apple’s field trip program isn’t exactly egregious on the scale of, say, ChannelOne, the 12-minute television program seen daily by an estimated eight million public school students in the United States. Studies of ChannelOne programming found that 20 percent of its air time is spent on coverage of ”recent political, economic, social and cultural stories,” while the other 80 percent is advertising, sports, weather and natural disasters.

Given Apple’s longstanding relationship with and loyal embrace by the K-12 education market in the US, together with the fact that kids get what Speirs described as “a high quality and low cost afternoon trip that the children thoroughly enjoyed and learned from,” I’d have to come down on the side of giving the company props for offering a unique and valuable service.

Apple has traditionally been viewed as a company limited chiefly to domestic sales. However, a review of sales figures suggests the iPhone 3G could unlock international markets, providing a ‘halo effect’ for other Apple products.

A halo effect has long been described to explain how iPod sales could boost purchases of Macs. Now some experts believe the iPhone 3G could give Apple a foot in the door to countries once alien to the Cupertino brand.

At the heart of the theory are numbers indicating Apple sold as many as half of iPhone 3Gs internationally. Apple shipped between 2.4 and 4.5 million of the 6.9 million iPhone 3Gs during the fourth quarter ended Sept. 30. The exact numbers depend on who’s talking.

16-year-old Nick Fala runs a thriving repair business for all things Apple from his parent’s home in Westerville, Ohio.

At age 10, he started repairing Macs for friends and relatives. After the iPhone debut, he had enough customers to start a business. Now his company NF Technology Services, fixes Apple computers, iPods and iPhones for corporate clients as well as his aunt, cousins and neighbors.

Not bad for a kid who probably just got his driver’s license.

Via The Columbus Dispatch

If you’re going down under, or know someone who is, have them pick up an iPod for you. The free fall of the Australian dollar has made it the cheapest place to buy one.

A survey of 62 countries found that an Apple iPod 8gb nano, measured in US dollars, cost $131.95 US dollars in Australia. That’s five percent cheaper than in Indonesia, where the same iPod would cost $138.47.

In Hong Kong, which used to top the cheap iPod scale, the same MP3 player now costs $148.36, almost exactly what it retails for in the US, $149.

Ok, so a “currency discount” of about 14% percent isn’t enough to warrant consumer electronics spending spree down under but it’s interesting to see how the iPod indicator/Big Mac idex on these prices fluctuates.

Via AFP

In this dark, puzzling British comedy starring Mackenzie Crook (Pirates of the Caribbean, the original The Office series) as a tube driver who has to kill someone to fulfill his dream, the plot twist is underlined in one of the final scenes when a Mac shows up.

Official site: Three and Out

Just a few days after announcing that Mac support for Netflix’s Watch Instantly service was on the way, the company has opened the door to its public beta here. With a quick install of Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, you’ll be good to go — not even a browser restart was necessary for me. I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now, and I’m really impressed. At least on my (admittedly brand-new) MacBook, it loads almost instantly, the video and audio quality is great, and the suggestions really do mesh with my taste. And none of the bizarre error messages I’ve seen in reviews of the older Windows version.

The site suggests that a 1.5 Ghz Intel chip is the minimum for Mac support. Anyone with an older machine had the chance to put this service through its paces?

This iPod speaker dock has been on display in Carnegie Mellon University’s design department for quite some time now. After weeks of trying to remember my camera when I’d be near the building, Lonnie’s post helped put the camera in my hands and my body in front of the display case.

It seems as though iPod docks are in vogue for design students. How many of you have made iPod “pedestals”?

Virginia Commonwealth University design student Kyle Buckner had an assignment “to create a pedestal to hold [a] ‘precious object’.”

We hope he received an A+ for the hand-carved wooden stand he created for his iPhone. Complete with Home Screen icon “leafs” that connect to a rod that spins inside the stand’s main arm, Buckner’s piece is made completely of wood, save for bits of plexiglass which connect each icon leaf to its “branch” on the stand.

Via MacLife

Other World Computing, an Illinois-based technology company, announced today the availability of a new service that converts your existing Intel Core 2 Duo based MacBook into a tablet computer that lets you draw and write directly on the screen.

Called Modservice, for prices starting at $1300, OWC will convert your Apple machine into an Axiotron Modbook.

MacBook owners who want to convert their computer into a Modbook can also have OWC upgrade the base features of the MacBook for additonal performance and capabilities. Available services include memory upgrades up to 4.0GB; higher capacity and/or faster internal hard drives up to 500GB; and faster DVD and CD burning with a new SuperDrive. They offer a Hard Drive Data Transfer option so your data can be backed-up and reloaded after the Modbook conversion is completed.

The Modbook has the same input/output features of the MacBook, retaining the full range of MacBook connectivity options via 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 (two ports), FireWire® 400 (one port), Bluetooth 2.0 and AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi 802.11n.

Intended for artists, mobile users, students and professionals, the Modbook uses integrated Wacom pen-enabled digitizer technology to offer users unique flexibility and control over the creative process.

It should be noted pre-modded Modbooks are also available from Axiotron, starting at $2200.

Designer Gopinath Prasana has concocted this wireless MP3 player that would keep your tunes handy, no hands required. And despite the girly name, it looks pretty unisex.

The prototype metal bracelet has a blue inner band that fills with air for a snug fit and a multi-touch track pad for easy navigation.

Nothing to keep you from discreetly turning it up or down in front of your boss.

Via Yanko Design

If you want to know how much money you’re spending on espressos, latte and the like (and gauge how much you’re buzzing), this is the iPhone, iPod Touch app for you.

CoffeeNut costs a buck. Which is still less than a cup of coffee, these days.

Via Geek Sugar

After Style.com, which is reporting over one million ads served via iPhone in a month, companies are launching iPhone fashion apps faster than a pop singer can add extensions.

A few that caught our eye:

E! Entertainment channel. Yes, this means the Fashion Police have made it to your iPhone. More for ogling those red-carpet horrors than reading, though, since scrolling is required for catty comments.

Perez Hilton. Love him or hate him, now you can get the snark and gratuitous photos on your commute.

Ralph Lauren, who began his career as Ralph Lipschitz, tie designer is now putting his latest runway creations, plus backstage clips and a look book on the must-have accessory of the iPhone.

Possibly in a fit of friendly rivalry with its competitor Fortune magazine, atop whose list of the 50 Most Admired Companies in the world Apple sits for 2008 at #1, Forbes magazine featured its list of the 10 biggest Apple failures this week, a gallery of which we reproduce for you below.

There are at least a couple of items here that grabbed a few hearts, but what do you think? Are these all Apple strikeouts? Let us know in comments.

Apple’s continuing quest to develop in-house microprocessor design capabilities hit a roadblock today, when IBM filed suit seeking to block one of its chief design architects from joining the Apple team.

Mark Papermaster, IBM’s former vice president of microprocessor technology development, had hoped to join the company in November to begin working closely with Steve Jobs and other Apple executives shaping the development of proprietary processors for servers and handheld devices.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, IBM attorneys described Papermaster as “IBM’s top expert in Power architecture and technology.” He most recently managed IBM’s blade server division and is also the author of several papers on chip development at IBM. The New York computer giant used to make PowerPC processors for Apple before the company switched to Intel’s processors in 2005.

CNet writer Tom Krazit penned a wide ranging article discussing the various possibilities Papermaster’s move to Apple could signal, from increased focus on ambitions in the enterprise market and cloud computing services, to continuing development of mobile platform processors begun with the company’s purchase of PA Semi earlier in the year.

In the end, he suggests “Papermaster’s hire might wind up as a partial solution to all those questions over what Apple should do with its pile of cash: give a chunk of it to IBM to make this case go away.”

Japanese mobile telecom provider Softbank announced Thursday it will offer iPhone customers a peripheral digital TV tuner slated for arrival by mid-December. With sales of the iPhone in Japan already looking to be only half what the company once expected, Softbank appears to be hoping the availability of high quality One Seg TV broadcasts will lure more buyers to the Apple phone in the saturated Japanese mobile handset market.

The device, with a footprint only slightly smaller than the iPhone itself, is expected to cost about $100 and will also feature the ability to extend the iPhone’s battery when connected to the iPhone by a dock connector.

Color me skeptical that the vaunted Japanese consumer’s love of gadgetry will make this a game changer for iPhone’s fortunes in Japan.

Via Crunch Gear

It seems unlike Apple, which has scoffed at inexpensive Macs and been viewed as catering to higher-income consumers. However a new study suggests the iPhone is fast becoming a favorite of low-income buyers.

From June through August, iPhone sales grew 48 percent in households earning between $25,000 and $50,000 compared to 21 percent growth overall, according to comScore.

The researchers found low-income consumers see the iPhone as a way to consolidate costs of a phone, broadband connection and music device.

Victor Vetterlein designed this slick prototype speaker dock to power iPods. The speaker base has rechargeable batteries that can power the stereo system for hours.

Vetterlein plans to make the dock capable of using a renewable energy source such as solar power, wind power, or hydroelectricity to charge the battery packs when the stereo is not in use. Each speaker is wireless and can be removed from the base unit.

Though this would look great in a living room, the rods between the speakers act as handles so you can carry the YO out for al fresco entertainment.

Via Dezeen

Over in the Cult of Mac’s new design post’s comments, we’ve had some pointers regarding what certain readers don’t want to see on the site, in terms of content. Since that article’s about the site’s design, I figured maybe we should have a comments thread dedicated to Cult of Mac’s content.

So, here it is. Please let us know what you like about the site’s content and what you don’t like. What would you like to see more of? What would you like to see ground into the dirt? Where possible, please be constructive in both praise and criticism, rather than just typing “you guys are rubbush” and laughing maniacally in front of your Mac. Shortly before noting the typo, obviously.

Now you can clip on your favorite songs in metallics: blue, green, pink and red. The original silver is still available for purists. It’s about time the iPod Shuffle got a color update, though I still miss the first gen design with the USB connector.

iPhone stands don’t get much simpler, or cheaper, than a standard binder clip. We like.

Via To Darrin Hudson

Apple’s iPhone was among one of the few bright spots in a gloomy third quarter for cell phone manufacturers.

Apple now has 2 percent of the global cell phone market during a time when cell phone makers scrambled to adapt to slowing consumer sales. In September, the Cupertino, Calif. company reported selling 6.9 million iPhones during the third quarter, a 516 percent jump over the previous year.

“Apple has become firmly established as a top ten vendor,” Strategy Analytics announced.

Analysts Thursday said global cell phone shipments either shrank or rose a tepid 5 percent to 8.5 percent.

As you’ve probably noticed (assuming you’ve been here before), Cult of Mac today got a new paint job. We’ve made a bunch of changes, most of which are designed to make the site simpler to use and the information within easier to access.

Having found that about 90% of Cult of Mac’s readers are using displays 1200px or wider, we’ve widened the site, to provide more space for content, [update]and then put it back the way it was, because lots of people complained. The simpler, cleaner layout means less wasted space and more focus for the articles, along with the ability for us to more easily add components. And the new navigation should make it easier for you to stream the content you’re most interested in. We’ve also rehoused the ‘top stories’ to the sidebar, meaning they’re accessible from all pages.

Over the coming months, further changes and upgrades will be made to the site, but please use the comments section of this post to tell us what you’d like to see. What do you like and not like about the site? How can we improve Cult of Mac and make it the Mac site for you?

AT&T announced today the availability of free WiFi access for its iPhone customers at thousands of hotspots nationwide. The company sent text messages to iPhone users and put up an informational web page noting the new service, but some greeted the news with skepticism based on aborted rollouts of the service in May and in July.

Among the hotspots slated to offer the service are airports, hotels and other public locations where one often must pay a fee to access WiFi networks. AT&T even offers a handy Starbucks location finder on its web page. After reading about this I was in the mood for an afternoon coffee, so I went to one of the several Starbucks in my neighborhood and, lo and behold, it worked.

Now, if it works the next time I’m in an airport, I’ll be really stoked.