And people think Apple doesn’t give enough information.

Amazon misses its earnings, income fell, sales missed Wall Street consensus and… the stock price goes up 6 percent.

Apple sells a gazillion of everything, reports record revenue and profit, and its stock falls.

I talked to one of the guys doing these straps at NAMM last week and he said everyone had the same look I did when told they were made of wood. He said they were very comfortable though. As you can see, Santana uses one.

I agree with Gruber. Every design decision involves some element of compromise. Microsoft seems to have compromised a lot, though.

Office 365 Home Premium, which includes such familiar programs as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Access, will be offered with a yearly subscription fee. Instead of buying Office flat-out as you did in the past, you will pay a $99.99 annual charge, which buys you automatic software updates, 20GB of extra storage on SkyDrive (Microsoft’s Cloud storage service), 60 Skype world minutes and use of all the Office programs on up to five computers or tablets.

This new apps are relegated to Windows devices specifically, but the service is available for Mac users – initiating a subscription gives you access to the Office 2011 apps which have been around for a while, and, presumably, new versions as they are released. The company continues to offer Office standalone software, as well. There’s a small business edition that costs $150 instead.

This comes almost a year after Adobe launched Creative Cloud, providing access to its Creative Suite applications via a monthly subscription fee, rather than charging a huge sum up front for a software license.

Editor’s note: Explained that the service is available for Macs, which use older software.

I had it all planned out. Inspired by Macworld contributor Joel Mathis’s recent piece on the subject, I was finally motivated and ready to cancel my cable television subscription. It didn’t work.

When I’ve haggled with Comcast about the cost of my package they’ve countered enough to make me keep my service. Plus they’re the only game in town for high-speed Internet (DSL doesn’t cut it and we’re a long way off, if ever, from getting fiber to the home in my area). So I can relate to Lex Friedman’s frustrations here.

Apple on Tuesday announced plans to introduce a new fourth-generation iPad model with 128GB of storage, twice the capacity of its previous high end model. The new version goes on sale Feburary 5, 2013 for $799 for Wi-Fi only and $929 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.

Besides the additional storage capacity, the iPad is a standard fourth-generation model. It comes equipped with a 9.7-inch “Retina” display with 2048×1536 pixel resolution. Under the hood is Apple’s A6X dual-core microprocessor, with quad-core graphics. The iPad comes with front and rear-facing cameras and a Lightning connector.

The 128GB model will be available for $100 more than the 64GB model, which will remain in production.

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Today’s the day that your cost-free tweeting about red signals comes to end, as Virgin Media begins charging for its WiFi service on the London Underground.

Virgin Media, Vodafone, EE, T-Mobile and Orange customers can stay connected for free; everyone else pays for the privilege using daily, weekly or monthly rates.

“As soon as we closed down the earlier Mac beta, we had always planned from that moment to develop a native Mac client that would actually be able to serve the needs of Mac players. We knew it was going to take some time, but we wanted to do it right.”

Great news for Mac gamers who have envied their PC counterparts since 2009, when League of Legends first broke on the scene. League of Legends is a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). Riot Games, the game’s developer, now counts 12 million LoL players a day.

First, the good news. The legal shield for jailbreaking and rooting your phone remains up – it’ll protect us at least through 2015. The shield for unlocking your phone is down, but carriers probably aren’t going to start suing customers en masse, RIAA-style. And the Copyright Office’s decision, contrary to what some sensational headlines have said, doesn’t necessarily make unlocking illegal.

Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains how legal protection has expired for U.S. citizens who unlock their own phones without their carrier’s permission; what it means going forward and how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) affects American consumers.

Following iOS 6.1’s release to the general public on Monday, Apple said that iOS 6 is now shipping on more than 300 million devices worldwide. That includes iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. Apple’s has shipped 500 million iOS devices in total, which would indicate that more than half of all iOS devices – about 60 percent – are running iOS 6.

A recent report in the Economist penned by Glenn Fleishman says that according to Google’s own data, the same percentage of the 600 million Android devices ever made – about 360 million units – run operating system releases prior to version 4.0. Fleishman says it’s a security risk, because Google is unable to serve those older devices with patches and system updates, often by design from their manufacturers or the system carriers they’re operating through.

During Apple’s previous quarterly call in October, Cook told analysts that iOS 6 had been downloaded to more than 200 million devices, and called it “the fastest software upgrade rate in history, that we’re aware of.” In a statement, Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller echoed Cook’s comments, saying that iOS 6 “may be the most popular new version of an OS in history.”

Jim and I have previously brought you news about our friend Corey Tamas’ fundraising efforts for his band Dragonfly’s album, “Amplification.” Now it’s available for download through bandcamp.com. Twelve Canadian dollars gets you 14 tracks of, as the artists describe it, “hard rock and heavy metal songs with eastern influences woven through.”

Check it out.

The Ohio Players frontman Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner died Saturday in his hometown near Dayton, Ohio, according to his Facebook page. He was 69. No cause of death was announced.

The Ohio Players helped define the sound of 70s funk and were hugely influential to generations of artists. “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster” are their two best known tracks, the latter famously covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the 1990s.

Some jackass wrote this review for Macworld.

iTunes in the Cloud and Up Next (first seen on iTunes 11) also made it in.

Apple customers in Britain have begun to seek compensation after the search giant bypassed security settings on their iPhones and Mac computers, allowing it to track their browsing habits.

Don’t be evil Google. Also funny that the American press isn’t all over this — if it was Apple being sued, it would be front page news everywhere.

Count Acer as being disillusioned with Windows 8, but seeing a future in Chrome. President Jim Wong says that Windows 8 “is still not successful,” while touting the benefits of Chrome notebooks, which he says already account for between 5 percent and 10 percent of Acer’s U.S. sales.

At 5 to 10 percent of Acer’s US sales, Chrome notebooks aren’t creating a tectonic change in the laptop market, but it’s interesting to see people getting used to the idea of a notebook running purely in the cloud.

Eric Engleman, Bloomberg:

Google officials say changes in the [Electronic Communications Privacy Act] are needed to prevent law enforcement from obtaining certain e-mails and other content without search warrants, and to give documents stored on cloud services the same legal protections as paper documents stored in a desk drawer. Cloud services, which didn’t exist when the privacy law was passed, let users store and process data on remote servers via the Internet.

Good for Google for trying to hold together the tattered remains of the Fourth Amendment.

Stephen Lawson, InfoWorld:

An ITU group has approved a successor to the H.264 video encoding standard, opening the door to future video transmission using only half the bandwidth that’s now required.

H.265 is also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). It improves video quality and doubles the data compression ratio compared to H.264 (the standard heavily leveraged in Apple’s QuickTime video technology). It scales up to 8192 x 4320 resolution, making it suitable for use with Ultra High Definition (UHD) signals.

Laura Hazard Owen, Paidcontent.org:

Barnes & Noble plans to close about twenty retail stores a year over the next ten years, the company’s retail CEO Marshall Klipper told the Wall Street Journal.

Up until 2009, Barnes & Noble was expanding at a rate of about 30 stores a year. Looks like more and more people are buying books from Amazon (and, presumably, e-books).

Android is going from strength to strength. Around 600m of the nearly 2 billion smartphones ever sold use Google’s mobile operating system, estimates Horace Dediu, the boss of Asymco, a mobile-analysis firm. How odd, then, that nearly two-fifths of those that remain in active use, both old and new, rely on outdated versions of it.

Glenn Fleishman explains one of the biggest flaws of Android – how cheap handsets, fast development and loose controls by Google adds up to hundreds of millions of handsets running outdated and unpatched versions of Android operating systems.

I’d like to thank Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Pixelmator is a great image editing app and all that I use on my Mac.

This started out as a page turning app for the iPad, but they adapted it for guitar. I saw it today at NAMM and was impressed.

iTunes 11 introduced some interface changes that longtime users, myself included, found very jarring. Kirk McElhearn has updated his “Take Control of iTunes” e-book with new content about iTunes 11.

Grant Gross, TechHive:

The deal complements AT&T’s existing holdings in the B block, the company said in a press release. The new spectrum will help the company deploy 4G LTE services and meet mobile broadband demand from smartphones and tablets, it added.

It’s a $1.9 billion deal with Verizon.