News Roundup for November the 24th

Bored already with the vanilla iPhone OS 2.2? The (unofficial) iPhone Dev Team have released the 2.2 versions of the PwnageTool and QuickPwn jailbreaking apps. “1337,” as I believe the cool kids are saying these days. Now here’s an interesting new stat for anyone playing iPhone vs. iPod Touch Top Trumps: apparently the 2nd generation Touch is a bit of a screamer in the 3D graphics department, beating even the flagship iPhone 3G. But one thing they both now share is a distinct lack of cheesecake, since Apple has pulled girlie picture app Wallpaper Universe from the App Store. We’ve chosen to self-censor the following punchline for fear that the next build of Safari will block us.

In ‘Apple can’t do right for doing wrong’ news, we have reports that the new MacBooks include HCDP DRM, meaning that some DRMed content will not play back on external non-DisplayPort displays. One customer found this out the hard way, as he tried to play back a movie on an overhead projector. Yeah, it could be that Apple hates you, or it could be they’re just telling you to get on with some real work. And how about the fact that the new MacBooks run up to 36% slower on AC power with the battery removed? Turn off the mains and this rises to 100%.

With the world and it’s wife lining up to sue Apple, you may wonder, what’s going to get them into trouble next? Well, it looks like it’s going to be their ‘questionable’ e-mail retention policy. Hey, I’m as pissed at Mail.app as the next person, but I’m not going to start legal action over it. Oh, that’s not what they mean.

If Apple needs to get itself some good publicity, they certainly don’t have a problem buying it. As their 10K filing earlier this month revealed, they spent $486 million on advertising last year. Nothing sinister about that, is there? Oh, there is? Boy, that Thurrott guy makes us Mac users sound reasonable, doesn’t he? Sounds like he needs something to cheer him up. Quick, somebody tell him that Best Buy in Canada are doing buy one, get one free on Zunes at the moment. Now, how many of you can spot the slight flaw in that otherwise watertight plan?