The highest grossing retailer on Fifth Avenue? The Apple store on 59th Street, the only one of the company's locations that is open 24/7, which generates sales of more than $350 million a year, according to real estate experts. [Bloomberg]

Yes, Steve Jobs is that evil. Silicon Valley spent the past month convincing itself AT&T just absolutely had to be responsible for kicking the useful Google Voice application off the iPhone App store. Whoops, it was Dear Leader.

Spotify is everything iTunes should be: Simple, free and completely ubiquitous. The internet positively overflows with shared Spotify playlists. But the damned Europeans have the online music service all to themselves. Well, almost all of it.

Some extraordinary communications have leaked to Bloomberg, showing Steve Jobs threatening his counterpart at Palm. It seems the Apple CEO — and supposed empowerer of creative workers everywhere — wanted to keep his workers locked down like so much chattel.

After kicking Google off its board, will Apple compete with the company on its home turf? Quite possibly: Apple's new server farm "would qualify as a big-ass data center," an official backend expert told Cult of Mac. OK then! (Pic)

Bryan Appleyard's lengthy Steve Jobs profile in the Times of London breaks no real news about the Apple CEO. And yet everyone's talking about it. Why? Because Apple tried so hard to stop the story.

As recently as late June, Steve Jobs was repeatedly spotted being chauffeured away from Apple's campus in a black car. Judging from this July 23 photo, the CEO has had enough of those vehicular ministrations.

Apple quietly told music executives about a special "keynote" event in four weeks, according to All Things D. Hard to see how CEO Steve Jobs avoids this event, after nearly a year in seclusion. Especially after recently rocking with Coldplay.

• Funny People debuted at No. 1 at the box office this weekend, although it was still the worst opening for an Adam Sandler movie in five years. [Reuters]
• Mort Zuckerman is selling shares of his real estate company to pump $50 million into the Daily News to pay for new printing presses. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs has become a PR nightmare for CNN. Presumably the fact that Media Matters is airing an anti-Dobbs commercial won't help matters. [AP, HP]
• Is the peace pact between Olbermann and O'Reilly a sham? [TDB]
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's board of directors. [BN]

Apple has announced Eric Schmidt is leaving the Cupertino company's board of directors by "mutual" agreement. Apple CEO Steve Jobs cites increasing competition between the two companies; by that standard this should have happened a year and a half ago.

Unlike other Silicon Valley honchos, Steve Jobs is famous enough to interest TMZ. How did the celeb-stalking site catch Apple's CEO leaving his Cupertino headquarters today? Not with a pricey telephoto rig, but with one of those ubiquitous iPhones.

Apple's two-month-old "Find My iPhone" has already jailed a criminal: A 15-year-old tracked down two iPhones and a wallet stolen from two cars. "As soon as I told [a police officer] the address, he started to laugh." Revenge is priceless.

Apple contractor Foxconn says it didn't beat a worker who recently committed suicide. But it is paying compensation to the victim's family, promising reform — and trashing the worker as a serial leaker.

Apple is poised to release a tablet computer early next year, according to AppleInsider. But first, picky CEO Steve Jobs gets to have some fun driving his engineers completely insane.

Microsoft got some good press after rival Apple demanded it stop running certain TV ads. Now the software company is getting more PR buzz by caving in to the demands. Savvy!

• Why did Janice Min leave Us? It was about money, reports WWD, which explains that given the economy, Jann Wenner wasn't prepared to offer her the $2 million a year she's been collecting. Min is denying it. [WWD, NYDN]
• Dan Rather’s $70 million lawsuit against CBS is back on track. [NYT, WSJ]
• McKinsey has been retained by Condé Nast to do the sort of "rethinking" and "realigning" that the consulting firm gets paid enormous sums to do. And while it isn't the first time McKinsey has been in the building—they were hired by Condé in 2001—this time employees are totally freaking out. [NYO]
• One title that is doing well: Food Network Magazine, apparently. [CNY]
• ESPN's Erin Andrews was secretly videotaped in the nude while staying at a hotel. Now an ESPN employee is said to have been behind it. [NYDN, AP]

Apple is famously hostile to leaks; to keep secrets, the company sued a teenaged blogger and lied about its CEO's health. This paranoid culture's new poster boy: a Chinese engineer who has killed himself after losing an iPhone prototype.



Sun Danyong, 25, recently jumped out the window of his apartment building to his death, VentureBeat reports. The engineer had just has his apartment illegally searched and may have been detained and abused by his employer, Apple manufacturing contractor Foxconn, after he lost one of 16 prototypes for a fourth-generation iPhone. Sun's frantic efforts to find the missing phone at a factory in Shenzhen, China had been unsuccessful.

Well here's an iPhone app that'll come in handy for most Gawker readers—Apple has approved something called "Cannabis," and it's awesome!

The economy may wax and wane, but overheated tech rhetoric lives forever. Today's how news: The internet apps for Apple's internet phone will soon be bigger than the internet. What?

Microsoft has long been prickly about Apple's inspired "Get a Mac" ad campaign; Chairman Bill Gates once accused Apple of "lying" with the TV spots. Now the tables have turned, and Microsoft is unabashedly gleeful to get under Apple's skin.