If retail stores are good enough for Apple, they’re good enough for Google.

Steve Jobs is already richer than most of us can ever dream. He’s worth more than 8 billion dollars according to the most recent estimates.

But he could be richer. A lot richer. In fact, a single mistake once cost Steve more than twenty nine billion dollars.

Are you running Lion on a MacBook Air that shipped with a Snow Leopard restore drive? Would you like to turn that sexy Apple-emblazoned USB stick into something that will restore your slim laptop to the latest and shiniest version of OS X in a pinch?

Great news: it’s actually possible to rewrite the MacBook Air Software Reinstall USB Drive to restore Lion to your Macs, not Snow Leopard. And while it’s not for the faint-hearted, nor is it for the superhacker.

Let’s be honest, typical email clients (like your old corporate buddy Mr. Outlook) are about as fun as a bag full of dead butterflies.  When was the last time you got excited to use Entourage or Lotus Notes? Probably never.

Luckily, Sparrow glided into the app-scene with a singular goal to make emailing fun. It’s lightweight so its zippy, yet packed with features no other email app has.  The love and energy the Sparrow team put into their app has changed emailing from a dreaded chore into something that is pleasurable and fun.

Yesterday, with great excitement, Cult of Mac launched a new software hub called deals.cultofmac.com. Teaming up with the guys at StackSocial, this new feature will bring Apple fans the best deals on cutting-edge Mac Apps at a price you won’t be able to find on the Mac App Store. We’re starting things off by offering Sparrow, the best mail-app for OS X, for only $6.

To celebrate the launch, we’re giving away 5 copies of Sparrow for free to our readers via a giveaway contest on Facebook. Entering the giveaway is simple, but you gotta play to win.

Here’s how to enter:

This morning, a report surfaced that the next iPhone would come with 64GB of storage for the first time ever. It’s looking pretty solid.

At the same time, rumors have been bubbling up for the last couple weeks that Apple would soon be discontinuing the venerable iPod Classic… and today’s move to axe the iPod Clickwheel Games section of the iTunes Store certainly seems to confirm as much.

That’s a bummer. Okay, sure, iTunes Match and iCloud take some of the hurt out… but what if you want to carry your whole music collection around with you without having to sign up for a data plan? For customers like that, the death of the only 120+ gigabyte iPod is a bitter pill to swallow.

Don’t worry. A new 128GB iPod touch is almost definitely coming.

Inheriting an old Mac does not always mean it’s ready to go with freshly reinstalled software. The Startup (Boot) Manager might show its friendly face sometimes when a valid boot drive can’t be found:

Recently I have been given a iMac G5 (light sensor). The guy who gave it to me has wiped the HD so I can start again. I intend to give this Mac to my parents for a present but before I go and buy a copy of OSX i decided to try and install a borrowed copy just to make sure the computer still works. As far as I know the copy works. But my Mac won’t have any of it. (don’t worry, I’m not asking you for advice on pirating). All that shows on the screen are two buttons. One has a circular arrow and the other has a straight arrow. Nothing happens when I click on either of them.

I have some exciting news: we’re launching a new software hub at deals.cultofmac.com.

Starting today, we’ll be bringing Apple fans the best deals in cutting-edge software and apps. We’ll be offering all kinds of deals: free app codes; 72-hour sales on premium packages; and bundles of the best apps — all at savings of 30% to 90% off retail.

We’re kicking off today with the smash-hit mail app Sparrow. It’s one of the highest-rated email clients on Mac OS X, and we have it for just $6.

Acer, the company that saw the iPad devour its Netbook market, is whistling past the graveyard again. This time, the Taiwan-based PC maker forecasts consumers will turn from tablets to Ultrabooks in 2012. Such talk could go into the same category of the Mayan calendar foreshadowing the end of the world.

We’ve been awaiting Facebook’s iPad app since Zuckerberg finally changed his mind on the whole thing, and we know it’s ready because we’ve already used it, so why don’t we have it yet? Well, apparently it’s been held up because of some “internal back-and-forth between Apple and Facebook”, but it’s now ready to launch, and will do so imminently — along with Project Spartan.

Although Samsung continues to supply parts for a range of Apple devices, making Apple the Korean company’s largest customer, the pair don’t seem to have the best relationship these days. They are currently involved in a number of legal spats which has seen Apple accuse Samsung of copying the iPhone and iPad with its Galaxy range of smartphones and tablets, but before the courtroom battles began, Steve Jobs gave Samsung the chance to put things right.