Apple will open a new retail store in Pebble Beach, a tipster tells us. He spotted "help wanted" signs. Julia Allisons of the world, mark it down as another place to find your Kevin Rose. According to Cosmopolitan, Apple Stores are ideal places to "check your email among cuties, take a free workshop on anything from Photoshop to podcasting (a great opportunity to strike up a conversation), or just survey the, ahem, good-looking merchandise." We've heard Apple Stores aren't a bad spot for whale watching, either. (Photo by laffy4k)

Apple's iTunes movie rental store has only 399 titles available for download. That's 601 fewer than CEO Steve Jobs promised at Macworld in January. Jobs has always maintained that Apple's market share isn't what matters — it's the quality of its products. Check out the top 12 iTunes movie rentals below — a list which includes cinematic thrills like No Reservations and Stardust — and see if that applies here.

A pair of analysts lowered their price targets on Apple today. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky is concerned Apple's next-generation 3G iPhone could be delayed this summer by carrier testing and fine-tuning. Banc of America Securities analyst Scott Craig lowered sales estimates for the iPod and iPhone in the face of weakening consumer demand. [WSJ]

Apple COO Tim Cook revealed an iPod-sales statistic at Wednesday's Goldman Sachs Tech conference: "For last quarter in the U.S., 40 percent of iPods sold were sold to people who did not own an iPod. In thinking about this number, this doesn't feel like a saturated market to us." The vast majority of my (admittedly gadget-loving) friends have bought several iPods over the years. I'm on my sixth, if you include my iPhone. Even my mother has had two and is thinking about a Shuffle. Just how many people bought an iPod last year? And how many were new to the white-earbud cult? Here's our rough estimate.

Apple COO Tim Cook explained Apple's iPod strategy at a Goldman Sachs conference yesterday: Sell less, make more. Worldwide iPod unit shipments were up 5 percent December-to-December — relatively low growth, thanks to slumping sales of Apple's cheap Shuffle. But iPod revenue still grew 17 percent. "Shuffle pulled the units down, the iPod Touch pulled the revenue up. Frankly, it was much more important for us to have a great launch on Touch and to establish that product ... than it was on units," he said. Cook continued:

AT&T is Apple's exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone because AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson let Steve Jobs have his way on pricing plans when other carriers would not. AT&T also pays Apple $18 a month per iPhone. So what has all that flexibility bought? An exclusive deal through 2012. But after that, no promises. Yesterday Apple's Tim Cook told Goldman Sachs investors the one-carrier model may not be around much longer."We're not married to any business model," Cook explained. "What we're married to is shipping the best phones in the world." And the carriers? They're just girlfriends. (Photo by andycarvin)

Good thing it's a leap year. Apple promised to ship its Time Capsule wireless backup device in February and made that deadline by two days. Customers began receiving confirmation of shipments this morning. Unless they paid for next-day shipping, they won't actually get them until the first week of March — but that's just nitpicking. As for Apple Stores, they're missing the deadline: "We don't have them yet, but hopefully in the next few days, maybe over the weekend," a clerk in the Burlington, Mass. store told me. [Macworld]

NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker told a hall full of future Harvard MBAs yesterday that Steve Jobs booted NBC television from the iTunes store last summer because Zucker merely asked to experiment with show pricing. In fact, Zucker went on, NBC Universal films are now a part of the iTunes movie store only because Jobs bowed to NBC's demand for variable pricing. It's a convenient narrative, but not what actually happened.

Recently, we noticed that during the latest Williamsburg crime spree, Apple products getting stolen left and right. A tipster even told us that somebody stole her iPod and Apple computer, but declined to steal her roommate's Dell! Now we now that the "iCrime Wave" is real—because an academic journal says so!

Apple's long-awaited software developers kit for the iPhone won't arrive in February like Steve Jobs promised at Macworld, but the first week in March is pretty close, right? That's what the fanboys wil tell themselves, at any rate, rather than contemplate the reality that their hero failed to deliver. Apple is holding a "Town Hall" event on its Cupertino campus next Thursday. Let's hope it's not Jobs and Phil Schiller drinking beers in front of a webcam. (Photo by AP/Kevork Djansezian)

Steve Jobs flew a lot last quarter — six three times as much as the average amount spent over the previous year and a half. An analyst thinks this means Steve has been doing lots of wireless deals all around the world to sell the iPhone. Or maybe he finally took that round-the-world vacation trip he's been dying to do. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Apple is now the second largest music retailer, beating Best Buy, in the United States. NPD Group, the market-research firm which tracks sales, estimates 12 single-song downloads as an album. Why don't they just count revenues? That would be easier. [BusinessWeek]

There's nothing that will tear your heart out quicker than seeing one of your immortal heroes decide to sell out. Hearing the "conscious" rapper KRS-ONE declaring "The revolution is basketball" in a Nike ad back in the 90's was a particularly dark day for me. But at least living people havethe free will to decide to sell out. An even more despicable practice is waiting until an icon is dead, then pimping their image out to the highest bidder. Some responsibility falls on whoever licensed their image for commercial use. Some of it falls on us, the consumers, for making these campaigns financially worthwhile. But most of it falls on the damn ad people who co-opt someone's cool without their attendant philosophy. And now that Gonzo extraordinaire Hunter Thompson has popped up in a Converse ad, it's time for some serious boycott action. Some things just aren't right. Right?

Apple has rolled out a minor update to its notebook line this morning. And yet the news has garnered 1,836 headlines on Google News. Why the crush of coverage for such a relatively small announcement? One could simply say "because it's Apple," but that's lazy, tautological thinking. Joshua Weinberg, a consultant who "as never worked for Apple, but observes the company closely," explains Apple's advantages in an essay on AllThingsD: Well-designed products, coordination, theater, knowing the difference between a small announcement and a big one, great product names, secrecy, and prompt fixes to major problems. He then expends an additional 2,475 words on the subject, but you can safely skip them.

"They're toads," Tony Kornheiser recently said about bloggers on a radio show for which he is paid good money. "They're little toads. Actually, they're pimples on the behind of the greater body politic in this country and in this city. And because, because they have access to airwaves and three or four people read them, they think, 'Oh, I'm very important.'" Kind of like radio hosts! But enough of that goofball, there are nine bigger blogger-haters who deserve derision — not because bloggers don't deserve constant mockery, but because insulting an entire class of people always guarantees failure.

Customer: Do you have the Time Capsule in stock?
Apple Store employee: Um, it's supposed to be out in February ... we're not sure when it's coming. But, it's a leap year so we have an extra day!

The software that allows programmers to build third-party software for the iPhone will be delayed one to three weeks beyond its February 2008 ship date. Shipping delays have become de rigueur for the company: In January, the Apple TV 2.0 software upgrade was delayed by two weeks. Last April, Apple announced it would be delaying the release of its next generation operating system to October because of the iPhone's pending release. No reasoning was given this time, but we wonder if Apple has sufficient human capital to turn all of Steve Jobs's fantasies into reality. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

2008 has not been kind to tech stocks, especially the Valley's leading lights.

Steve Jobs isn't on Facebook. Now his wife has disappeared from the site. A few days ago, we posted about Laurene Powell-Jobs's Facebook page, and her curious membership in the Apple network, normally restricted to employees. Today, it has disappeared from view entirely. It's not visible to anyone searching for her name or from within the Apple network, to which she belongs.