If you like staring at silicon without its clothes on, you’ll love this: Chipworks has done a teardown of the iPad 2’s new A5 processor.

It’s a technical read, and frankly, I’m not Cylon enough to understand most of it. The most interesting detail for us laypeople is that it’s actually pretty honking huge: at 120mm, it’s actually more than twice the size of the A4’s 53mm CPU, allowing Apple to cram in more cores, transistors and a bigger GPU for more oomph all around.

According to Chipworks, the SoC is still pretty much off-the-shelf. It’s manufactured by Samsung, despite Apple’s rumored partnership with TSMC to build iPad 2 chips, so it doesn’t look like Apple’s given Sammy the boot just yet for daring to release their own tablet.

Ouch. If you haven’t ordered an iPad 2 yet, I hope you’re willing to wait over a month to get one, as iPad 2 shipping estimates have slipped again, this time to four or five weeks for most models.

iPad 2 shipping estimates have been slipping since mere hours after it went on sale online in the wee hours of Friday. Originally put up for sale online at 1AM PT with a 3-5 business day shipping estimate, that slipped in mere hours to 5-7 days, then to two weeks and now to over a month.

If you haven’t ordered your iPad 2 online yet, your best bet might be to drop by your local Apple Store on the way to work today. Rumor indicates that Apple Stores will open at 9am today to service iPad 2 sales on a fresh shipment, and I can confirm that, at least at the Apple Store I’m currently parked at, Apple employees are already bustling around inside.

As we noted earlier, the weekend’s silliest headline came courtesy of hair product Jon Bon Jovi, who ranted to the Sunday Times of London that “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”

This statement is astoundingly ignorant. The iTunes Music Store is easily the most popular record store in the history of the world, having sold more than 10 billion songs in its eight years of existence. One can decry the very notion of digital distribution. It’s impossible to argue with business that big.

Moreover, when iTMS hit the scene in April 2003, it was a godsend to record labels. After all, Apple didn’t invent digital distribution of music. They invented legitimate digital distribution. Napster had hit the scene a full four years previous, making it possible for college students across the country (myself included, briefly) to readily share reasonably high-quality music files with one another over the Internet in simple fashion. As soon as Shawn Fanning flipped the switch in 1999, the music business needed to change itself or disappear.

For years, it chose to disappear, waging costly legal battles with Napster and its near-relatives Audiogalaxy, MP3.com, Gnutella, Kazaa, Morpheus, and LimeWire. Hilariously, the Recording Industry Association of America’s belief that they could sue file sharing out of existence did little but spur its growth and, more critically, its innovation. BitTorrent, the radically distributed and difficult-to-trace open file sharing protocol, hit in 2001, arguably a few years before it would have arrived had the record companies reached a deal to distribute music legally through Napster. Also, Metallica.

It was into this mix that Steve Jobs arrived. And with him, the record industry finally changed. A little. They finally signed on with a legitimate way to purchase music over the Internet, for just 99 cents a song. And it was revolutionary, driving unprecedented volumes and moving a lot of iPods in the process. But, like Bon Jovi, the record industry has a short memory, and immediately began demanding to sell songs for more money on iTunes, as well as demanding a higher percentage of revenue from each tune, even though, at 70:30, they were already doing better than a typical margin at a record store.

Anyway, they got what they wanted again, but still they rant and whine about devaluing music or killing the romance of the art form. Generally, they resent that the vast iTunes library has allowed indie bands to get more attention than they ever were when major labels controlled distribution. And those indie labels are doing great now (see what Merge Records has accomplished with Arcade Fire and Spoon), as are some of the independent record stores that thrive off of their albums.

Honestly, at the end of the day, the Web’s arrival in the early 1990s was a sign that all media would eventually be delivered differently than it previously had. It was obvious that early. But the entrenched media covered their eyes and their ears and hoped things could remain the same. And now that an inevitable reality of digital music, video, books, and periodicals have arrived, everyone wants to get mad at the one company that’s actually helped figure out how to make record labels some money in the last decade. Whether they like it or not.

In short, JonBon: “This Left Feels Right” killed music. Steve Jobs is the one who helped you profit from that murder.

The Sunday Times Magazine: LITD: Jon Bon Jovi, 48, rockstar (paywall)

In the System Preferences application, you’ll see an icon called “Language and Text”. If you open this, and select the Text tab, you’ll see a list titled “Symbol and Text Substitution”, which provides some useful text shortcuts. You can use these to auto-correct common typos as you make them, or to replace short text mnemonics with longer words or phrases.

Microsoft is killing the Zune player after five years of unsuccessfully trying to compete with Apple’s iPod.

The Zune is being discontinued thanks to weak ongoing sales, Bloomberg reports. It will not be refreshed when current units sell out.

When the Zune was introduced in 2006, in mold-breaking brown nonetheless, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted the player would one day overtake Apple. But it failed to even crack the top five MP3 players. According to NPD, Apple had 77% market share in 2010.

“MSFT abandoning Zune last sign AAPL totally dominated portable music for the last decade,” tweeted industry analyst Michael Gartenberg. “Sony, Samsung, Dell all failed to move needle.”

Gartenberg also predicted that tablets will be the next Zune.

Pundit Paul Kedrosky said: “My main reaction to news that Microsoft is going to stop selling Zunes is … Microsoft still sold Zunes?”

Instead of selling hardware players, Microsoft will shift its focus to putting Zune on smartphones running Windows mobile OS.

With its world class design, Microsoft’s young hip image, and ground-breaking advertising like the spot below, is it any wonder the Zune failed to take off?

(This is a joke, btw)

Check out this video of the iPad 2 playing Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade on a 50-inch LG HDTV running at 1080p, thanks to the new iPad HDMI adapter. That’s a ten-dollar game looking just as lurid and beautiful in high-definition as a $60 Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game.

If you’ve ever used and loved the “Archive” function in Gmail or MobileMe, then found yourself missing it while using Apple’s own Mail application, this simple free plugin is a dream come true.

It’s an Archive button for Mail, and you can guess what it does. Instead of having to mess around with filing messages into folders, a single click will throw them into the archive. It even comes with its own ready-made keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+S), to make archiving even faster and easier.

When you need to find something specific, use Mail’s own search, which is quite up to the task of hunting through enormous archives (I’ve used Mail in this way, as a backup for my Gmail account, for years now).

If you need Mail to be a little more flexible, try Mail Act-On, which we mentioned back in number 8 in this series.

(You’re reading the 33rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)

A new  iPad app for Cosmopolitan magazine, expected to debut later this week, drops the pretense that women read it for the articles: it features an interactive sex quiz with men groaning and lots of pics of shirtless guys.

Fashion bible Women’s Wear Daily got their hands on the magazine app featuring hot hunks and steamy sex advice to find that the $2.99 new app, called “The Showcase Edition,” contained only two articles.

Instead, there’s an interactive feature, already a favorite with magazine staffers, called “Decode His Bedroom Sounds,” which promises to help women understand what a “load moaner” really means — and whether she’s got one — by emitting what was described as “unholy sounds.”

Just marvel at the engineering behind the iPad 2’s Smart Covers. Between them, the iPad 2 and its Smart Cover contain an incredible 31 magnets.

Apple has made extensive use of magnets in the past – to hold a remote control to the iMac, for example, or keep the lid of a MacBook closed. But it has never used so many magnets in a product, or so elegantly.

The 31 magnets in the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover:

• clip the Smart Cover to the side of the iPad
• Keep the Smart Cover attached to the screen when closed
• ensure the Smart Cover retains its triangular shape when folded into a stand
• instantly wake the iPad and put it to sleep when opened and closed

It’s really quite mind-boggling. iFixit has the details.

One of the first things I wanted to try out on the iPad 2 was the cameras. I found them to be nice to have for convenience and Facetime calls, but less than adequate for photography. Let’s face it they suck at photography when compared to my iPhone 4 and Canon G12.  The iPad 2 won’t be replacing either of these anytime soon. I think that is okay, because I don’t see myself wandering around trying to catch that special moment in time wielding an iPad 2. After all it is kind of big, right?

However, the cameras are there and I might as well make the best use out of them that I can. So I launched iTunes and I looked at the iPhone and iPod touch camera apps within my app library and installed some of them onto my iPad to test.

Here are the results.