Before we get to the modern Macs on tap for today, there is another chance to buy a piece of computing history. There is a number of deals on older Macs, including a CRT iMac, running a blazing-fast 500Mhz G3 processor for just $39. Last week we had the MacBook Pro Lalapalooza and today we have the MacBook Pro Lalapalooza Part Deux. You can grab some unibody MacBook Pro machines starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo model or pay $1,358 for the just-released MacBook Pros plus three years of AppleCare.

Along the way, we’ll check out the latest deals on iPhones plus new bargains on Mac software, including Mac OS 10.6. As always, details on these and many more items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

What’s up with Google now? That’s the question being asked about the Internet giant’s acquisition of a mysterious startup run by former Apple employees. The San Jose, Calif. company Agnilux includes Dan Dobberpuhl, the former founder and CEO of P.A. Semi, purchased by Apple for $278 million two years ago.

First reported by Thomson Reuters’ PEHub, the deal with Google is raising eyebrows about the lengths being taken to keep the company below public radar.

Even HP’s aware that they’ve got a tough fight on their hands convincing consumers that they want to give them their $500 bucks for an HP Slate tablet as opposed to the iPad… but the PC manufacturer may still be be too optimistic.

If an early review of the device is anything to go by, it’s not going to be a fight… it’s going to be a slaughter.

Landing Pad is a lovely piece of work; a blog that celebrates the beauty of the best-looking iPad apps around, in all their full screen glory.

No scrappy little thumbnails here; at Landing Pad, each app is shown full-size, as Steve Jobs intended it to be seen.

In all seriousness, for those of us outside the US who still haven’t even seen an iPad yet, this is the next best way of getting a good idea of what it looks like after watching Apple’s official (and somewhat too clean) videos.

Landing Pad is the work of the tech consultants at Thoughtbot. Writing on their blog, Chad Mazzola provides some background:

“The iPad and iPhone provide a platform that makes excellent design the standard, not the exception. The elegance and power of multi-touch technology and the iPhone OS, matched to restraints on factors such as screen size and browser, have allowed the creation of applications that fit perfectly in the environment they inhabit. More and more, websites and applications built specifically for iPhone OS are overtaking their desktop companions in ease of use and sheer beauty.”

Or, to put it another way, (i)apps are a threat to websites as we know them. Maybe.

In Part 2 of My Close Encounters with Steve Jobs, Macworld-founder David Bunnell tells of seeing the Mac for the first time, and why Steve Jobs parks in handicapped spaces.

ePub Bud is a new site that simply describes itself as “YouTube for children’s books”. And it’s just right for iPad.

This week the TidBits website celebrates a special landmark: it’s the oldest purely digital technology publication on the Internet.

Started in 1990 by Adam and Tonya Engst, TidBits is celebrating its 20th anniversary of publishing “all the news that’s fit to byte.”

It started as a Hypercard stack and evolved into a text pub distributed through the web, email, AOL and Usenet, plus innumerable BBSes.

Today it’s stronger than ever, publishing a website, mailing list, iPhone app, Twitter feed, Kindle subscription, and podcast. Plus, it has a popular eBook publishing wing, TidBITS Publishing Inc., which has sold about 250,000 Take Control ebooks.

To celebrate, Adam has put together a testimonials page from more than 50 Mac industry leaders. Add your own comments to the page.

The iPad App Store market may be worth at least $1 billion in two years, according to one developer who did some quick math. That figure could be much higher if the iPad does what the iPhone did to boost App Store sales into the stratosphere.

Vimov, which developed the Weather HD iPad app, estimates Apple is making $136 million per year – or $372,000 per day – just from the top 1,000 apps. That is based on the 500,000 iPads now in the US.

Ahead of today’s earnings report by Apple, analysts are weighing-in on what we could expect to hear from the Cupertino, Calif. electronics powerhouse. Mac sales were up 25 percent in the March quarter, according to one analyst.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated Apple sold between 2.8 and 2.9 million Macs during the second quarter, based on the 25 percent figure from retail watcher NPD. Although the sales number was close to Wall Street’s consensus of a 22 percent jump in Mac sales (2.7 million) for the March quarter, the news sent Apple shares down nearly 2 percent in Monday afternoon trading. The reason: The 25 percent sales jump in March was seen as a sign of slowing down from the 43 percent growth in February.

Even with a little boost to 20MB over a 3g connection, and VoIP recently being allowed thanks to an SDK update, the iPhone’s potential continues to be impaired by data restrictions set by AT&T. If you’ve taken the plunge and jailbreaked your device, there’s a $2 app that will let you stick it to the man with unlimited data access over 3G. Incidentally, 3G Unrestrictor was one of my reasons to jailbreak way back in 2009.