Microsoft's plan to counteract Apple's pigeonholing of the company as "PC," the staid, gray suit-wearing office drone played by John Hodgeman in Apple's commercials? Start sounding more like Richard Nixon of course. Microsoft announced it will spend $300 million on an advertising campaign with agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Corporate VP of Windows Consumer Product Brad Brooks told reporters the message will be: "The quiet majority of million and millions of Windows Vista users out there are going to have a great experience. The message is ‘Move to Vista. The time of worry is over.’" Sounds a lot like Nixon's 1969 appeal "to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" for support for the Vietnam War to us. Which of course puts Apple in the late Beatles-esque, commercially safe "think different" psuedo-hippy crowd — right where it wants to be.

Doug Field, described as "the driving force behind Segway" on the company's customer forums, is leaving Segway for Apple, where his role will be "a VP of product design" according to a Segway coworker. (Just nosy: If Field is not the VP of product design, but a VP, then how many vice presidents of product design does the company have?) A few years ago, Steve Jobs slammed the Segway as "this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional," and challenged Field to design "things that would make you shit in your pants." Will Field make good on that? Video or it didn't happen, Doug.

Everyone likes to talk up Apple's innovative design. It's a much more attractive story than the real reason why Apple has come to dominate first the MP3 player market, and soon, the smartphone market: Ruthless haggling with suppliers to lock up crucial components, shutting out rivals. Apple is buying 50 million 8-gigabyte memory chips from Samsung — the kind used in its entry-level iPhone 3G — and Samsung is cutting off other customers as a result of tight supplies. [DigiTimes]

Last Friday, shareholder plaintiffs filed suit against San Jose District Court against Apple CEO Steve Jobs, former CFO Fred Anderson, ex-general counsel Nancy Heinen, and members of the company's board of directors looking to reclaim the $7 billion in lost stock value when the company restated its financials in the wake of a — let's say it — hopelessly boring stock-option scandal that takedown-hungry journalists cared about far more than their readers. Let's be real: If anyone really cared about Jobs's fudging of stock-options grant dates, would it have taken so long to drum up some outraged shareholders? This smells of bored lawyers. The old-news complaint:

The dirty little secret behind the keyboard-tapping, button-mashing, cell phone-yapping, Valley lifestyle? Electronics manufacturing and waste are incredibly toxic. The cycle of planned obsolescence may drive profit growth. It also drives continuing shipments of used and broken electronics to places like Guiyu, China, where workers like the one pictured here make pennies picking over silica wafers for precious metals, while drining water polluted by lead and other industrial contaminants. Amidst all the cleantech hype that venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will save the world with technology, companies like Apple and Microsoft are still busy polluting it with old iPods and Xboxes. Microsoft is the second-worst polluter amongst large electronics manufacturers, according to Greenpeace. And while Apple's charming fakir Steve Jobs has made a public commitment to improving the company's environmental record, it lags behind less "innovative" rivals Dell, HP and Sony. But hey, can you believe the gas mileage you can get in a plug-in hybrid?(Photo from Getty Images)

US customers will be able to purchase new iPhones without locking themselves into a two-year contract with AT&T. It'll just cost an extra $400 — $599 for one with 8 gigabytes of storage, $699 for one with 16 gigabytes. Customers will still have to sign up for an AT&T wireless subscription, but it won't have the same penalties for changing carriers. Analysts figure it costs Apple about $173 to manufacture each iPhone, and believe Apple is selling the phones to AT&T at about $400 each. That means that at $599, Apple and AT&T are roughly splitting the extra $400 profit on an unlocked phone. Almost makes you wonder why AT&T bothers to sell subscriptions.

Tired of fielding lawsuits from patent trolls and scared of court injunctions like that faced by RIM which nearly shut down the company's BlackBerry service, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents before they fall into the hands of patent trolls. (That's the polite name the group's founders use for companies which seek to make money litigating infringers rather than by create products.) But the real bogeyman here is the rise of a possible patent troll to rule all patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, which has close ties to Microsoft.

ComScore reports that there were 1.5 million searches for the word "iPhone," 88.4 percent of them answered by Google. One wonders how many of the searches were performed on an iPhone. [ITwire]

Obviously tired of being pestered with questions about iPhone this and Steve Jobs that, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg put on a tinfoil hat and sat down for an interview with the Financial Times:

Manufacturing and material costs add up to $173 for each 3G iPhone, analysis firm iSuppli Corp reports. That's 35 percent and $92 less than iSuppli estimated it cost Apple to build the original iPhone last year. Credit Apple CEO Steve Jobs' sharp elbows with component suppliers, who's price cuts account for most of the decrease. Expect that overhead to drop, and margins to rise, when Apple can being leveraging PA Semi-designed chips in the devices. (Photo by AP/Sakuma)

Apple COO Timothy Cook is the man most likely to replace co-founder and current CEO Steve Jobs according to Fortune.

You have to hand it to Google, because thanks to them the food is only getting better for hungry cube-dwellers trapped on expansive campuses. Former Google food director John Dickman has been hired by Apple, and I can only imagine how Steve Jobs must have felt about the company's second-rate cafeteria status — as he considers himself the premier tastemaker in the Valley. Even Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has Google-level cuisine, and that kid wears shower shoes outdoors. [FoodGal] (Photo by System One Gang)

Sydney residents stop drinking XXXX Export and making fun of the wankers in Melbourne to wait in line for the opening of a new Apple Store, where they were greeted by the typical forced enthusiasm from employees. Can you suggest a better headline? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "FUCK IT, WE'LL DO IT LIVE! THIS THING SUCKS!" by matto. (Photo by Catherine)

After an interview with employee Dan Frommer, Silicon Alley Insider publisher Henry Blodget received a "threat" from an Apple shareholder who didn't like the pair's skepticism about the market for iPhone applications and the stock's performance. But rather than go after Blodget for shorting AAPL, why not mention that the analysis comes from a man who had to settle a fraud suit and was kicked out of the financial business? That seems easier. [Silicon Alley Insider]

How to grow the iPod market beyond the faddish, technofetishistic trendizen crowd? Analysts, and Apple, are looking to the corporate market, with better security, email support and GPS. The problem? The device is tethered to a single carrier, Apple hasn't played nice with corporate IT in the past and, frankly, the suits bore Steve Jobs. And you are never, ever, to bore Steve Jobs. The real problem is that customers might want to keep the iPhone a personal device to lug around with their Blackberry and company laptop — so that they can have a personal browser free from management's all-seeing eye.

Now made for masturbating during overlong board meetings or car trips — the iPhone. The burgeoning mobile porn business, which was once confined to slow-loading sepia-tinted Jpegs of flappers in bathing suits, now features all kinds of fun applets for erotic text chatting, "moan tones," and video. The $1.7 billion industry set to balloon even further once the iPhone 2.0 debuts on July 11. The Google search results on "iPhone porn" are tumescent, too, and there are many, many websites in existence that can cater to all your hand-held smut needs. Here are a few:

Apple will move into a new New York office tower going up on 510 Madison, taking two floors. The building is still under construction, but developer CBRE Richard Ellis has a live construction cam you can use to follow its progress. Glancing at sketches,we expected more from design-obsessed Apple. Other than the pictured garden terrace, and a for-tentants-only indoor pool and health club, the place looks pretty much like every other Manhattan office tower.

Isobella Jade didn't have a computer when she started her modeling career in 2005. But she needed one for scheduling shoots. Her solution? Work from the Apple Store all day. When our MacBooks break down, we do the same! Except we're not "body parts models," so when the clerks ask if they can help, they're asking if they can help us please stop now. The "trailer" from Jade's autobiography,Almost 5'4", is embedded below. Skip two minutes in for the Apple Store's weird cameo.