No, it’s not. But a quick glance at its box might fool you into thinking so, and that’s because Sony seems to have used Apple’s default OS X Lion wallpaper as the background image on the company’s EX621 BRAVIA TV.

For the past several hours, the Apple Store has been down, but unlike when we usually say that, Apple’s seemingly not doing just maintenance… instead, store.apple.com seems to have totally crashed.

Making things stranger, the Apple Online Store fell over on a Wednesday, as opposed to the traditional Tuesday maintenance period. Some users have reported in the last hour the usual ‘We’re Updating The Store” message… so could a new product be imminent?

Now that Google has itself a handset maker and a passel of patents, the Android creator is likely to come gunnin’ for Apple, right? Wrong, say a number of Wall Street analysts, who expect little negative fall-out for the iPhone maker. If anything, the acquisition threatens the chances of any mobile success story outside of the Apple-Android duopoly.

Most of Apple’s money comes from recently invented gadgets. More than two-thirds of Apple’s revenue comes from product types that didn’t even exist five years ago (iPhone and iPad). And 78% of Apple’s income is made by products unimaginable just ten years ago (throw in iPod and iTunes).

That means, in order to stay on the same growth curve in the current decade, Apple will have to invent product categories as new as the iPod, iPhone and iPad were, right?

Wrong.

The new products were part of a killer strategy Apple came up with in 1997. Apple will dominate the future by sticking to the strategy, not by trying to invent more product categories.

After a hard day’s work, I like to sit in front of the TV and stick my feet up my a hot cup of tea and a copy of the day’s paper. Other Brits feel the need for something a little more exciting, such as looting electrical stores for anything they can sell on the black market and torching whatever’s left.

Thankfully, Apple’s iconic glass-fronted retail stores should come to no harm, as some reports suggest Apple is granted “special treatment” from the U.K. police force.

Two weeks after releasing iOS 5 Beta 4, Apple has now pushed a fifth beta out to developers. You can grab iOS 5 Beta 5 with your registered developer account in the Dev Center, and the update can also be received as an over-the-air update on a device running iOS 5 Beta 4.

Apple’s no stranger to lawsuits, but this one’s a bit bizarre: a New York photographer is suing Cupertino for using one of her copyrighted photos in an iPhone advertisement. But does she have a case?

Following this morning’s story that reveals Apple’s plans to launch a movie streaming service called iTunes Replay, one analyst believes that Apple has something more spectacular up its sleeve — a service that will take on Netflix.

Now that Lion on your Mac looks just like iOS on your mobile device, Apple is now considering dropping its desktop and laptop software in favor of a single OS platform based on apps and the cloud. The idea has so many advantages, an OS merger is likely to begin next year.

Apple is getting set to launch a brand new service that will compliment iCloud called iTunes Replay. The service will allow users to re-download and possibly stream movies they have previously purchased through iTunes, and could go public within the coming weeks.