In just a few weeks of iPad ownership, I’ve all but retired my MacBook. I thought I needed a laptop for work, but really, I don’t. I have not looked back since.

I own an Apple consulting company here in Florida, Max Your Macs. As members of the Apple Consultants Network, we support a wide range of clients all over the state ranging from individual home users with basic needs right up through corporate, medical, legal and creative environments with much more demanding settings.

Before iPad was released, I had been plotting and planning how to use this amazing machine onsite. I was longing for the day when I could slim down from carrying a large Swiss Gear pack with my MacBook Pro or MacBook Air to a small, light sling pack – but I was skeptical the iPad could fill the requirements.

And it does. Here’s how I use the iPad in the field:

Can’t decide whether to get the iPad with or without 3G? It looks like AT&T will soon be adding tethering, but you can already share your iPhone’s 3G data connection using a $10 app called MyWi.

All you need to do is jailbreak your iPhone — a painless, two-minute process that unlocks the iPhone’s full potential, including turning it into a personal Wi-Fi hotspot using MyWi.

Apple’s factory leak is just getting bigger, and Vietnam continues to be the undiscovered country of Apple leaks, this time with exclusive photos of the new iPod Touch… this time sporting the long rumored 2MP camera we’ve been waiting for for the past years.

Vietnamese site Tinhte’s photos show a 64GB iPod Touch that looks remarkably similar to the current model, except for the addition of the camera sensor (which, surprisingly, is center-mounted on the back… I thought for sure the rubber foot on the left corner was where the iPod Touch’s camera would inevitably end up).

The biggest surprise here is that the fourth-generation iPod Touch isn’t sporting the same design as the iPhone, but is sticking with the current unibody, reflective unibody casing. And it looks like my wet dream of a microSIM slot in the iPod Touch was just that.

No matter, though: I’ve been waiting for a camera on the Touch for so long, this is easily a day one purchase for me. We’ll know for sure when we can pick one up at WWDC in June, although an early September release is historically the most likely bet.

Back in 2003, Steve Jobs decided to cancel his “nearly worthless” stock options at Apple in exchange for $75 million.

If he had kept them? They’d be worth $10.3 billion dollars in profits today.

I’ll eat any old crap — and I mean, any; even hot dogs from an NYC hotdog stand.

But not everyone is as cavalier about what they put in their mouths. Try being vegetarian for a bit, or eating only food that is halal — Islamic law that describes how food must be prepared — and things get significantly more complicated (but yeah, accepting that NYC hotdog stand visits are a no-no is probably a good place to start). So an Auckland, New Zealand-based developer created two slightly different apps that’ll make life easier in both cases.

Think of it as Craigslist — but on steroids that give it super-speed and spidey-senses, and without the alarming hey-why-is-hair-growing-there side effects.

Just like Craigslist, users can trade goods or services; but Anttenna (no, that’s not a typo) also leverages phone tech like geotagging to create local micro-marketplaces based on the location of users, and then connects them through social-network tool Twitter — which the app is built on — for more immediate buyer-seller communication than Craigslist’s increasingly snail-paced-seeming email system.

It doesn’t yet have the massive throng of participants that makes Craigslist such a powerhouse, and its sophistication may actually hurt it, as one of the appeals of Craigslist is its simplicity. But who knows; a year or two from now, we may all be hearing things like “so hey, did you ant your old MacBook already?”

We start out another week with a new crop of App Store deals. First up is the latest App Store freebies, including “Turn the World,” a puzzle game. A memorization puzzle game, “Mindshapes” leads off the iPad app price cuts. Finally, we round out our featured deals with an Apple Store offer: 8GB iPod nano for $99.

Details on these and many other items ( such as unibody MacBook Pros starting at $929) are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Sure, the app store is swimming in trivia quiz games, but Qrank is different — and ever since the game raised its shiny little head up off the App Store floor earlier this month it’s had us hooked like sugar junkies to a candy factory.

the free app cranks (you knew it had to be in here) out a fresh quiz every day, and you’re only allowed one crack at it per day, which is one big reason why it’s as addictive as, well, crack. That, and the way the game connects players socially — everyone has to answer the same questions, which makes it easy to let your friends know you’re smarter than them.

If you don’t have friends, the game publicly ranks you against everyone else playing that day, so you can be smarter than your state, the nation — or the whole world.

Bill Maher might be on to something. The politicomedian made a bold statement last night that suggested Steve Jobs (aka Sven Jorbs) should make a run for the Oval Office.

Last week, President Obama admitted to being technologically challenged. Maher, noting that the President’s historic run for office was fueled primarily by social networking, refused to take Barry’s ignorance as adorable. Video and transcript after the jump.

The first sales figures of magazines testing the iPad are coming in and so far they are muted. Conde Nast says it has sold 365 iPad editions of the December 2009 Men of the Year issue, so far.

“This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage,” GQ vice president of publishing Pete Hunsinger told reporters. “Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation,” he added. GQ, which began selling the iPad version in April, sees the period as a testing phase, where the publisher can test the waters on pricing, advertising and ways to offer a digital version of the print publication.