New Apple Friend Bar Gives Customers Someone To Talk At About Mac Products

Another chunk of genius from The Onion, poking fun at those of us who love our Apple products a little too much.

The Apple Friend Bar, it says, is a new service where ordinary Mac fanatics can book appointments with experts who will be happy to just chat about Apple products. All. Day. Long.

My favorite part is when the Friend Bar employee is quoted saying: “Unlike your girlfriend or co-workers, we’re not going to get tired of discussing the wireless networking capabilities of the Snow Leopard operating system.”

By many people’s estimations, the iPad is missing anywhere from between one and two cameras, and Apple’s curious choice to eschew adding at least one web cam to their tablet when they already had their video-conferencing standard FaceTime in the wings is often cynically described as a move to encourage customers to quickly upgrade to the second-gen unit once it pops out of Cupertino’s manufacturing shops.

Why wait until then, though? This iPad Cam-Case design by Chet Rosales adds a swiveling camera to the enclosure. Of course, without proper support from Apple (and a port of FaceTime to iPad), a case like this would be pretty useless… but we’re hopeful, if not optimistic, that Apple might choose to sell something like this themselves when the camera-equipped, second-gen iPad comes out sometime in the next year. Let’s not leave the early adopters behind.

We start off today with three hardware deals, including Mac minis and MacBook Pros. The first bargain is a Mac mini Intel unit running at 2.26GHz for $499 from the Apple Store. Next is a unibody MacBook Pro starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz version. Lastly, we look at a 17-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 2.26GHz processor for $2,749.

Along the way, we also check out a deal on iPod nanos, including an 8GB unit for $99. As usual, all details on these and many more itens are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Remember all the talk a few months ago whether the iPad would hurt sales of the iPod touch? That fear was overblown, according to one prominent analyst who Tuesday described the impact as ‘minimal.’

Additionally, despite early talk the iPad was selling better than Macs, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster expects the Cupertino, Calif. firm will sell more computers than Wall Street predicts. Indeed, Mac sales were up 37 percent for the first two months of Apple’s third-quarter, the period when iPads first went on sale.

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As far as compulsive time wasters on the App Store are concerned, Doodle God is a new favorite.

The game is a silly puzzler, in which various elements are combined to create new elements. Some of the puzzle logic is hysterically (and frustratingly) wonky: the combination of “Life” and “Rock” results in “Egg,” for example. Successfully bond two elements together and you’re given a new building block to play with, as well as a pithy, oft-times humorous philosophical quote.

I’ve really been enjoying the game, inscrutable though it sometimes may be. If you’re interested in trying it before you buy, there’s a great Flash version, or you can pick it up on the App Store for just $0.99.

This is a guest commentary by Chicago music producer and author Chris Gray.

The inclusion of a physical caps lock key on modern computing devices has annoyed me to no end… because it allows for easy etiquette abuse by a great number of users.

I recently wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking him to lead the way in putting this annoyance to bed. Remove the caps lock key. Replace it with another enter key or something else. It’s only use is FOR SHOUTING IN EMAIL AND BLOG COMMENTS.

The much anticipated Archetype first-person shooter has hit the US App Store today and claims to deliver a “high quality console-style FPS experience on iPhone or iPod Touch.”

First launched in the Czech Republican App Store, Archetype, for just $2.99, offers 3 game modes; Training, Challenge and 5-on-5 Team Deathmatch over Wi-Fi, 3G and even EDGE. With 5 maps to choose from a variety of weapons, Archetype seems a must for any online FPS fan.

Features include a precise dual joystick-style control system, the ability to rank up by earning experience points, an offline tutorial mode and the opportunity to add friends and challenge them in team deathmatch.

Developers, Villain, have also optimized Archetype for the iPhone 4’s retina display by offering high-resolution graphics that provide fantastic looking weapons and textures, and, they claim, “headshots never looked so good!”

Get your hands on Archetype in the App Store here and let us know what you think!

Two of the most popular sporting games for iPad have gone on sale today for a limited time only courtesy of Gameloft, who have slashed the prices of Real Soccer HD (previously $6.99) and NFL 2010 HD (previously $4.99) to just $0.99.

I’ve found both games to be a great buy, in fact, Real Soccer is one of my favorite soccer games for the iPad, so if you’ve been considering either of them, now is a great time to snap them up!

Gameloft also has a sale currently running on two of their other games including Hero of Sparta HD and Brain Challenge HD, both of which have also been reduced to $0.99.

The savings don’t stop there, though – as well as their sales, Gameloft have permanently cut the prices of both Modern Combat: Sandstorm HD and Gangsta: West Coast Hustle HD from $6.99 to $4.99.

I cannot think of another iPad app that makes me want to take out the velcro and stick my iPad on the wall as much as Emerald Observatory does. This gorgeous app is simply stunning to look at and it is a useful astronomy tool too. Once you have it running on your iPad you won’t hesitate to display it for everyone to see and it will become a striking conversation piece.

Ever since Apple purchased streaming music site LaLa back in 2009 and Cupertino’s acquisition of a massive data center in North Carolina, safe money has been on iTunes moving into the cloud. But why haven’t we seen it yet?

According to an interesting rumor posted by Electronista, it all comes down to licensing.

Currently, Apple has a deal with the music industry that allows customers to stream music from their own computers to other devices, Airtunes. However, this existing licensing agreement doesn’t apply to streaming music directly from Apple’s servers, which would require an entirely new deal to be inked.

If Apple’s going to announce iTunes Live this year, it would be at September’s iPod event… but according to Electronista, many record label executives haven’t even heard of Apple’s service, which may indicate that we won’t see streaming iTunes this year at all.

[via Boy Genius Report