Apple rumours have become almost beyond parody, an industry in themselves with websites, twitterfeeds and column inches dedicated to digging them up and dishing them out. Charlotte Henry thinks that may be behind some of Apple's rushed products, and Apple fans, media and bloggers are to blame.

Shocked, we say. Shocked. We are utterly shocked*. Sales of the HTC First—the so-called "Facebook Phone—have reportedly been so bad that AT&T is ready to kill it. The device was announced on April 4th, but according to BGR, AT&T has sold just 15,000 units and is ready to pull the plug.

When Adobe announced that it will be dropping its traditional perpetual license model for Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and the rest of its professional creative apps in favor of the Creative Cloud software subscription model, the public response was less than enthusiastic. The reaction from at least some Adobe app users was so negative, in fact, that an online petition quickly popped up urging Adobe to keep the Creative Suite perpetual license model alive. But that petition may not matter.

Over the weekend, Cult of Mac ran a story about how new technologies are threatening to leave the iPhone behind. The premise there is that there is no longer room for vision, that a technology race determines the ultimate winner. John Martellaro weighs in with a rebuttal.

Let's offer a salute to clever game developers, especially Patrick and Daniel Klug, the cofounders of GreenheartGames. When they released Game Developer Tycoon for Mac, Windows, and Linux, they decided to put a cracked version of the game for pirates to steal on bittorrent, but they did so with a twist: players playing the cracked version of the game will find that piracy drives them bankrupt.

Recently, a Microsoft executive suggested that Apple's iOS is boring. Why would he say that?  John Martellaro knows exactly why. Thank goodness iOS is very boring indeed.
 

Former Rutgers Athletic Director Tim Pernetti has reached a settlement with the university, and the good news is that he gets an iPad. Oh, and US$1.2 million, some insurance, and a car allowance, but when the AP found details of the settlement, it was the money and the iPad that made the headline.

I love this one: some folks may not remember, but rumors started up in 1996 that Steve Jobs might team up with Oracle Larry Ellison to buy Apple, or maybe Mr. Ellison was simply going to buy Apple so his buddy could run it again.

In a sign of both Apple's increasing clout in China and growing consumerism in that country, representations of Apple products have become a top offering to the dead. NBC reported that cardboard representations of iPhones, iPads, and iMacs have joined more traditional offerings of fake money, food, and bags of clothes as offerings to the dead at the annual Qingming Festival, or "Tomb Sweeping Day."

John Martellaro doesn't really think there would be a problem naming OS X 10.9 "Cougar."  In fact, Apple should.  It's a fairly big, strong cat, and the name connotes power and ferocity. Much more so than "Lynx."