Apple

∞ What Apple should buy, Thursday edition: Nintendo

IndustryGamers: “As Nintendo’s share price continues to plummet, it is fair to ask if they are an acquisition target,” observed Panoptic Management Consultants CEO Asif Khan to IndustryGamers. “With a market capitalization around $20 billion, there are a handful of tech … Continued

∞ Apple looks to buy another $5 billion in patents

Bloomberg: InterDigital’s engineers invented some of the technology for high-speed mobile phone networks now used by the world’s biggest handset makers. The King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based company may fetch more than $5 billion, according to analysts at Algorithm Capital and … Continued

∞ Florida school trades textbooks for iPads

Orlando Sentinel: “When students at the new Lake Minneola High School in Lake County return to classes in a few weeks, they’ll have access to more than half a million dollars worth of new iPads that they’ll use at school and at … Continued

∞ New Macs include Mac App Store iLife license

Macworld: “…if you haven’t yet gotten around to upgrading to iLife ’11, buying a new Mac mini or MacBook Air essentially gets you iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for all your Macs running OS X 10.6.6 or later (since you need … Continued

∞ Make your product so 'it just works'

Time: Once upon a time, products that were labeled as betas were indeed undergoing beta testing. They were works in progress, and nobody dreamed of sharing them with the general public. The Internet changed that by making it easy to … Continued

∞ Mac mini refresh posts impressive benchmarks

Macworld: “Based on Macworld Lab’s benchmark results, the new Mac mini models provide a great leap in processor performance over the previous generation.” James Galbraith reports that the new Mac mini beats the pants off its predecessor in most tests, … Continued

∞ Apple opening Grand Central retail store

NY Post: The 23,000-square-foot store will take up Grand Central’s north and northeast balconies, displacing Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur restaurant, according to MTA documents. Apple will initially pay rent of $800,000 a year, nearly half a million more than Metrazur paid. … Continued

∞ Apple may surpass Exxon Mobil in market cap

Electronista: “Apple added $60 billion to its market cap during the month of June. The company may be able to leapfrog Exxon if several planned products prove enough of a catalyst…” Wow. And if it comes to pass, Apple will … Continued

∞ Acer says Apple is starting a patent war

AppleInsider: “As Apple’s patent lawsuits against HTC have created concerns among market watchers, and have even strongly impacted HTC’s stock price, Wang pointed out that the player, which started the patent war, wants either money or market influence and should … Continued

∞ Apple in talks to buy Hulu

Bloomberg: Apple is in early talks that may lead to an acquisition offer for Los Angeles-based Hulu, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. This is interesting. Apple could do a great job with an streaming video service, … Continued

∞ AirDrop only works with certain Macs

AirDrop is a new feature in OS X Lion that lets you wirelessly send files to other OS X Lion users, without Wi-Fi. But it only works on certain Macs. Apple has posted a KnowledgeBase article explaining which ones work:

∞ iTunes, iWork updated for Lion

Apple has released updates to its iTunes and iWork software to make them compatible with Wednesday’s release of OS X Lion. The updates are available through the Software Update system preference.