With the 30-pin dock connector on the brink of extinction, you’re probably wandering how you’re going to hook your iOS devices up to your TV without the help of an Apple TV. Your old HDMI and VGA adapters won’t work, and Apple didn’t announce any new ones at its iPhone 5 event. So does that mean AirPlay is the only option?

Thankfully, it does not. Apple has confirmed that Lightning-compatible HDMI and VGA adapters will be arriving for your new iOS devices “in the coming months.”

We thought we’d had it all figured out.

When Apple bucked the trend of numerically naming the iPad by calling the Retina iPad the “new iPad” instead of the iPad 3, we thought it was a sure thing that they’d do the same thing for the next iPhone. The next iPhone, then, would be “the new iPhone” or the “2012 iPhone”, not the iPhone 5.

It made total sense, in a way: Apple doesn’t add a numeral to the end of its other products, like the MacBook Pro or the iPod Classic. They don’t even do it for the iPod touch, which is basically the most current iPod with all the phone guts stripped out. Why continue setting apart the iPhone as a sequel to the handsets that have come before when you can position it, not as an incremental update, but a timeless product in its own right: the Mercedes of smartphones?

That’s the way Apple handles the rest of its products, but with the invitation for today’s, and now Apple accidentally spilling the official name of the next iPhone on their website, it now seems clear that Apple is going to call the sixth-generation iPhone the ‘iPhone 5’ after all. Why would they do that?

Google was blindsided when Apple won its lawsuit against Samsung, which was really a proxy war between Apple and Google, because if Apple can defeat Google’s Android OEMs, they’ll win the battle against Google.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, David Lawee, VP for corporate development, says that Google hopes that they are over the hump in the thermonuclear war, and he also admits that Apple winning the lawsuit was a big wakeup call. Watch the clip below for the full details.

Over the past couple of days, Apple’s been busy updating Yerba Buena and rehearsing their keynote deliveries in preparation for the iPhone 5 announcement. The iPhone 5 is a sure bet. We know it’s coming. You know it’s coming. But will Apple have any other goodies to show off at Wednesday’s keynote?

What do you think Apple will announce along side the iPhone 5? New iTunes? Apple TV update? Maybe an iWatch? We want to hear your ideas, whether they’re totally legit or completely whacky.

Click here to tell us what you think Apple will announce on Wednesday at the Cult of Mac Forums

On Friday Apple started preparing the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, California for the long-awaited iPhone 5 event that will be taking place this Wednesday. Journalists will pile into the venue to watch Tim Cook and company unveil the next iPhone and other surprises. Per tradition, Apple has begun putting up larger banners outside of Yerba Buena the weekend before the event.

We stopped by Yerba Buena to get a look at the signage Apple is putting up. Check out more on-location shots from Yerba Buena in our gallery below.

Apple’s stock price has continued to rise the last couple of weeks making it the most valuable company in the world, and debatably the most valuable company ever. Some might think that Apple can’t sustain those numbers over the long-term, but right now their prospects are looking great.

The scary thing – if you’re an Apple competitor – is that even though Apple is huge right now, it’s still growing. Fortune released their list of the 100 fastest-growing companies in the world today, and Apple came in at #8 while competitors like Google and Samsung didn’t even make the list.

Trip Chowdhry, the Managing Director of Equity Research at Global Equities Research, told a financial writer a few months ago that Apple’s biggest challenge without founder Steve Jobs is that Apple lacks a “unified force.” In order to become unified again, Apple would need a “supernatural person” overseeing things.

But according to Thai Buddhists, they may have exactly that — the reincarnated spirit of Steve Jobs himself, who they say is living in a “mystical glass palace hovering above his old office at Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

I’ll tell you in this post more about Jobs’ so-called reincarnation, and also about several ghosts caught haunting various Apple products. (And I’m not talking about problems with the MacBook Pro Retina screens.)

Here’s all the spooky stuff that’s going on. 

I like the Apple Store as much as any Apple fan, but I wouldn’t want to live and work there.

You can’t say the same thing for David Wu, though. “Call me mad. Call me crazy. But I woke up one day around three months or more ago and decided to completely renovate my home study.”

So what’d he do? He made his home office a virtual recreation of an Apple Store, not only including a replica of Apple’s distinctive Fetzer Wooden Maple desks (with working drawers), a replica Apple Store sign with built-in, Apple TV-driven LED display and even a couple shelves full of boxed Apple products.

I’ll go ahead and call David Wu crazy. Here’s to the crazy ones. Read more about how he did it at his blog. More pictures of David’s sick set-up below, but make sure to go to Wu’s personal site for the rest.

A California court recently ruled in favor of Apple in a high-profile patent case against Samsung, and the immediate fallout means that Samsung is forced to pay Apple over $1 billion in damages. Federal Judge Lucy Koh will hold an injunction hearing in December to see if Apple is permitted to ban several Samsung phones from being sold in the United States.

The court’s decision was by no means a simple one, as this Apple vs. Samsung case is considered the most important tech patent lawsuit in history. That’s why every bit of the ruling process is being put under the microscope, including Jury Foreman Vel Hogan, the man who led the jury to rule against Samsung last Friday.

A new report reveals that a possible conflict of interest could have affected the case’s ruling.

It isn’t too difficult to understand why the jury involved in the Apple versus Samsung case made the verdict it did last Friday, awarding Apple a landslide victory and more than $1 billion in damages. But what isn’t clear is how the jury came to its decision. Thanks to Jury Foreman Vel Hogan, we now have a fascinating insight into what it was like to be part of that panel.

In his first TV appearance since the billion dollar patent trial came to an end, Hogan reveals how he made up his own mind, how the jury decided on the damages Samsung must pay Apple, whether feelings and emotions influenced the jury’s decision, and more.