The techno-sweatshops of Beijing have never seen an Apple design they weren’t willing to ineptly rip off, but these MacBook Air knock-offs spotted by M.I.C. Gadget are the first I’ve actually liked.

Basically, what we have here is a white plastic simulacrum of the MacBook Air’s aluminum unibody chassis, crammed with the innards of your stock, last generation netbook: an Intel Atom N280 processor with up to 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.

I love it, right down to the lid’s pulsing, multichromatic logo! If Apple ever introduces a plastic unibody Air, this is exactly what I would imagine it looking like. It’s unfortunately a Windows machine, but at around $249 I’m tempted to pick one up anyway, just to see if it’s as easily Hackintoshable as my Asus Eee PC 1000HE. What a coup one of these MacBook Air netbooks with Snow Leopard installed would be for my gadget cred next time I showed up at the blogger’s hall at CES.

We reach mid-week with a variety of deals for Mac fans, including 6 bargains on Apple iMacs, starting at $849 for a 20-inch desktop with a 2.66GHz processor. A few steps up the food chain, Apple also offers several Mac Pro Xeon workstations, including a 3.2GHz unit for $3,299. Finally, if you liked the Grammy’s and want to relive the great music, lala.com has an MP3 album of this year’s nominees.

Along the way, we look at a new batch of App Store price drops, new games for your iPhone and various hardware bargains. As always, details on these items and many others are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

At this point, conventional wisdom firmly places the stateside release of the forthcoming Apple Tablet in March, with the possibility of a delay to June. That’s a long enough wait for Yanks, but what about the rest of the world? According to The Guardian, Britons can expect a delay of at least a few months.

The Guardian’s sources claim that Apple has only just started looking for a carrier partner in the UK who will be willing to bundle a 3G contract along with the subsidized Apple Tablet. It’s the absence of a British partner that will ultimately delay the Tablet’s release.

Of course, this presumes that the Tablet is only going to be solely available in the UK with a carrier contract… but I highly doubt that Apple is going to make that a consumer requirement for a non-phone device. In that case, I would assume that this delay only faces customers who want to pick up subsidized devices, while people willing to pay full price and supply their own 3G SIM will be able to buy the Tablet will be able to pick it up sooner. Or at least I hope.

‘Minor issues’ with Apple’s tablet could force the Cupertino, Calif. company to delay shipping the highly-expected device until June, suggests an analyst. If correct, the three-month lag would dispute previous claims a tablet would ship by March.

Issues with battery life and durability are suspected culprits of any delay, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told investors Tuesday. The holdup would put the tablet, which Wu calls the “iSlate” into a more traditional pattern for Apple. When the company introduced its first iPhone in 2007, it announced the iconic handset in January and began shipping in June.

My inamorata likes, on occasion, to wistfully pine for an alternate reality in which her grade school predictions of Apple’s future success had been funded by a benign patriarch and made her a plutocrat. Instead, she got a cynical ‘C’ from her teacher for her “implausible” stock pick, and now blames this woman every day for her daily diet of bread crusts and dry Ramen.

The point is, it’s foolish to bet against Apple’s stock rising, but could analyst Gene Munster be taking it to far? He told Henry Blodget at The Business Insider that Apple stock could someday be worth $1,000 per share.

Munster’s reasoning is that Apple is well underway towards being the global smartphone leader and that Cupertino will be able to maintain its incredible growth rate. As the iPhone gets cheaper over time, there’s room for explosive growth. In the meantime, Apple seems ready to revisit its iPhone success with the forthcoming Tablet, which will expand Apple’s media profits in bold new directions.

Understandably, it seems like people took Munster’s comments as a reason to pick up Apple stock, as it closed at an all-time high yesterday of $215.04 per share. If you’ve got a few bucks rubbing together, you may as well get in: it’s just only going to go higher.

The slavering, cannibalistic undead have shambled onto the App Store in the new Dawn of the Dead game, available now for iPhones and iPod Touches.

As a fan of Romero’s spaghetti zombies, I’m slightly disappointed to learn that Dawn of the Dead is based not on the original 1978 classic, but Zack Snyder’s execrable 2004 remake. That means fast zombies and Ving Rhames. Ugh.

Still, it’s hard to go wrong with a zombie game, and Dawn of the Dead seems like a perfectly serviceable zombie masher. Its gameplay model seems plucked from the likes of games like Dracula X, Crimsonland and SmashTV: it’s a top-down shoot-em-up, with a number of weapons and power ups.

At $1.99, you might as well pick it up: with the forthcoming zombie apocalypse as certain as the release of the Apple Tablet, you’ll need all the zombie-beheading practice you can get.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I was suddenly bewitched by the heavenly tones of a siren’s call radiating from the single speaker inside my favorite Starbucks. I was enraptured, overwhelmed with the sudden desire to find out to whom these dulcet tones belonged! Gripped in a fever of curiosity, I quizzed the barista, but — tragedy! She didn’t know! Would I never find the answer?

After I calmed down a bit, I realized, like everything else, there’s an app for that. In fact, there are two — one of which is truly outstanding.

We start off the week with new deals on MacBook Pro computers, more juice for your iPhone or iPod touch, and your own collection of classic reading material for free. The Apple Store has nearly two dozen MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $999 for a 2.26GHz 13″ unibody MacBook Pro. Are you looking for a convenient way to boost your iPhone’s talk or music time? The Morphie JuicePack lets you have 250 hours of standby or 24 hours of music for just $66. Finally, have you wanted to build your library of classic literature but don’t have the bucks, or the space? We have a deal you can’t beat: 112 titles, including Wizard of Oz, Little Women and Frankenstein, for free from the iTunes Store.

Along the way, we look at ways to conserve your computing energy, connect faster, hear better and become a comfier couch potato. As always, details on these and many more bargains can be found after the jump.

Next week, Apple will either officially unveil their much-rumored tablet device, or the lot of us are going to look like complete idiots. Either way, it should be a fun week, but as anticipation boils to a pitch, we might as well keep ourselves entertained with a look back at the prehistory of Apple’s last tablet launch: three Newton prototypes evocatively codenamed the Bic, the Cadillac and the Batmobile.

Nowadays, you can’t launch a mobile device without an accompanying app store. Right after the iPhone, Apple launched its App Store – the same for Nokia, RIM, Android and others. In a sort of Marshall McLuhanesqe moment, the app – not the device – will soon become all important.

“Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry and applications themselves will help determine the winner among device platforms,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director for Gartner. Indeed, consumers will spend $6.2 billion in mobile application stores this year, racking up 4.5 billion downloads in 2010.