Anyone who has used the new MacBook Air can attest to what a tiny miracle it is. Spec-wise, it doesn’t look like much at all, but even the 1.4GHz 11-incher surprises by bleeding the edge of OS X performance in nearly all the ways that count for the average users through the accomplishment of its standard SSD drive. Consumers are thrilled, and so is Apple, with Tim Cook recently saying that Apple saw the new Air as “the future” of the MacBook line.

Looks like NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang agrees, but if anything, he’s even more excited about the Air than Cook is, claiming it’s not just the future of the MacBook line, but the future of laptop design across all platforms.

Earlier this week, ABC 13 Action News in Houston, Texas reported that an unnamed West University woman was robbed in front of her house. An iPad owned by the woman was used to locate the robbery suspect.

The woman was robbed at gunpoint while placing her child into her car. The robbery suspect took her jewelry and iPhone.

Here’s the cover of the March 2011 edition of Wired magazine, which just showed up in the mail:

1 million workers

90 million iPhones

17 suicides

This is where your gadgets come from. Should you care?

Yes, you should care. We do. Kudos to Wired for shining a much-needed spotlight on this important issue.

It’s unlikely that Apple will use Liquidmetal for the new MacBooks that are expected any day now, but it sure would be sweet. Check out how svelte the machines would be if Apple used the extra-stiff material.

Mockup by designer Dario Crisafulli.

Via SagiaMente.

Who wants one?

If you’re ready to play at smuggling illegal immigrants over the US border, check out the demo for “Smuggle Truck.”

The game, from Boston company Owlchemy Labs hasn’t yet been approved by Apple, but you can try it out on gaming portal Kongregate for free.

“Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration” has released a storm of controversy – and free publicity – for the game devs hope will be approved for iTunes by March.

Yesterday, Apple revised its App Review Guidelines, and one of the provisions was that apps would no longer be accepted if they were primarily comprised of media content better sold through iTunes or the iBookstore. In other words, apps could no longer be mere wrappers around movies, albums or e-books.

That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t want movies and books on the App Store, though. They just want their apps to be more than just wrappers. Case in point, Warner Bros’ latest app: they have just released The Dark Knight as a downloadable app that contains a free five minute preview of the movie, with the full film available as an in-app purchase.

The distinction? The Dark Knight comes with a lot of extra features, just like you might find on the DVD version. Since that’s something iTunes Movies can’t do — yet! — Apple seems to be okay with Warner Bros’ releasing their movies in app form… which is good news for Warner Bros, who intend on releasing more movies as apps later in the year.

Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use Liquidmetal — a high-strength metal that is light and can be processed like plastic — in their future products.

An ex Liquidmetal exec thought Apple would make iPhones out of it. A source speaking to MacTrast, though, says that Apple’s Liquidmetal investment won’t debut in the iOS line, but instead in March’s MacBook Pro refresh… which looks like a far more radical redesign than previously suspected.

Microsoft has finally released its first piece of software on the Mac App Store, but it’s not one of their premier software packages like Office. Instead, Microsoft is dipping their toes in the App Store water by releasing Windows Phone 7 Connector as a free download through Apple’s digital delivery system.

Windows Phone 7 Connector has been available in beta since October, but it’s now a final release. The Connector app allows owners of a Windows Phone 7 device to sync their iTunes music, videos and podcasts to their phones.

Of course, we’ve never been quite sure what sort of mad man uses a Mac but owns a Windows Phone 7 device over an iPhone, but we’re sure there’s at least a few of them out there… albeit employed exclusively in Microsoft’s Mac software division.

If you’re one of them, you can download Windows Phone 7 Connector on the Mac App Store by just clicking here. Hey, why not… it’s free.

The next time you buy a couch, a car or a caffelatte, you can tell management what you think of the service with a stroke of your iPhone.

The Tello app lets you give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down and add comments on the fly as well as share your service woes or whoahs via Twitter and Facebook.

It runs on the iPhone, iPad and there’s a mobile version, too. Tello’s interface is clean, simple and has a database of 14 million businesses and if it can’t find your bodega, you can easily add it.

I wasn’t really surprised by the popularity of my post Apple Publishes Six Free Electronic Books for Developers since I’ve been telling everyone that developer topics would be popular and you delivered. That post was re-tweeted 253 times and shared on Facebook 92 times which isn’t to shabby for a short news blurb about books for iOS developers. So, the good news out of all this is that I’ll be covering more developer related topics on Cult of Mac in the future. Especially due to all the nice comments on the above post.

Therefore let’s get started by taking the six free books and adding some good books that are worth purchasing to your reading list. If you are interested in iOS development then you should not overlook these books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.