Many thanks to Indev for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Indev is proud to sponsor Loop Insight this week. Indev is the leading developer of plugins for Apple Mail Application. Mail Act-On, MailTags and Mail Perspectives transforms Mail.app into a email powerhouse and gives users the ability to process, organize and monitor their email more effectively and efficiently.

Use Mail Act-On to create sophisticated rule workflows to automate actions and process email with keystrokes. Use MailTags to add meaningful metadata, including keywords, importance, projects and dates, to your messages and create a flexible email organization system. Use Mail Perspectives to create compact windows for your messages to monitor the contents of your mailboxes and smart mailboxes at a glance.

MailTags 3, Mail Act-On 2 and Mail Perspectives are all compatible with OS X 10.7 and will soon be compatible with OS X 10.8. Loopinsight readers gain a 15% discount on all Indev products when they use the coupon code LOOP when ordering from Indev’s secure store.

Matt Richman takes a look at how far the average selling price (ASP) has fallen.

Apple:

Apple today announced that Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will retire and the role will be transitioned to Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of iPad Hardware Engineering, over several months. The entire hardware engineering team will continue to report to Mansfield until his departure.“Bob has been an instrumental part of our executive team, leading the hardware engineering organization and overseeing the team that has delivered dozens of breakthrough products over the years,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are very sad to have him leave and hope he enjoys every day of his retirement.”

Elisha Marquez has been accepted to Ivy League schools and is on her way to Stanford in the fall. The 18-year-old has already nabbed an engineering internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and earned a scholarship through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

But her GPA wasn’t high enough and she got beat. These parents need to chill out.

Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2013 was $2.8 billion, down 33% from $4.2 billion in the previous quarter and down 43% from $4.9 billion in the same quarter of fiscal 2012. The revenue breakdown for the quarter was approximately 59% for hardware, 36% for service and 5% for software and other revenue. During the quarter, RIM shipped 7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones and approximately 260,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

Just brutal.

Google on Thursday announced that its Chrome browser will launch in the App Store for iPhone and iPad, as well as a native iOS application connected to the Google Drive service.

Part of what makes Safari so fast on iOS is the Nitro engine. I wonder how Chrome will compete with that.

I loved Billy Mays.

TJ Draper:

I can see how this is a major improvement if you have been using iTunes to manage podcasts and syncing them from iTunes to your iDevice. But while this is a major improvement over that scenario, this is by no means a good app.

Great news from Aspyr. I love Call of Duty.

At the heart of BlueStacks is a multi-OS runtime with breakthrough virtualization technology. Apps developed for different operating systems can execute simultaneously, side-by-side, on the same computer.

There is a kickstarter-like page allowing people to donate to have Mosspuppet come out of retirement. He’s a funny little man.

If you’re the type who likes specs, check out this comparison chart from Bryan Chaffin.

Justin Michael made this incredible illustration after I joked on Amplified 12 that I wanted a kickstand on everything I owned.

Om Malik:

However, when you stand back from all the announcements made by Google today and increase the periphery, you start to notice that this is a company that is fighting a lot of battles on many fronts. In some places it is winning, but most places it is trench warfare.

Michael Lopp:

One of my favorite Apple product announcements happened on September 7, 2005. In an Apple music event announcement, Steve Jobs got on stage, gave the usual state of the business update, and then he did something I’d never seen before. He killed a wildly successful product.

I often use this as an example of how Apple beat its competition and drove them crazy trying to catch up. Who would kill a product as successful as the iPod mini? Steve Jobs would.

Chris Armstrong takes a look at Apple’s new Podcast app. Personally I love the tape deck.

It doesn’t just happen to Retina displays, but I’d be pissed if this happened to me.

Here it is.

Jim and Dan discuss the Podcasts app for iOS and the implications it has for both existing podcast applications as well as for podcasting as a whole, Sirius and the Google TV, Epic games success on iOS, when Apple fanboys attack, Orbitz, the Retina MacBook Pro’s financial affect on Apple, and more. Jim also offers his advice for getting back into the guitar by practicing Megadeth.

Sponsored by Shopify (use code 5BY5 for 3 months free), Igloo Software (they’re giving away an Aeropress to a B&A listener), and MailChimp’s new Mandrill email service.

That’s impressive.

When I redesigned The Loop, HTML5 and CSS3 were high on my list. I didn’t care so much about supporting older or non-compliant browsers.

Apple finally made it happen.

Apple is bringing the iTunes Store to music fans in Brunei, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

The one to Uncle Bryan is funny.

Where the hell is the beer?

Podcasts app is the easiest way to discover, subscribe to and play your favorite podcasts on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Explore hundreds of thousands of free audio and video podcasts from the Podcasts Catalog, and play the most popular podcasts, organized for you by topic, with the all-new Top Stations feature.

Dana Mattiolo for the Wall Street Journal:

Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.’s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.

Orbitz says that users can overcome the issue by ranking results by price. If this leaves as nasty a taste in your mouth as it does in mine, though, the better solution might be to skip Orbitz all together in favor of a different site that doesn’t discriminate based on your platform. (The article suggests that Expedia, Priceline and Travelocity do not, by the way.)