Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, thinks Apple will sell a record 25 million iPods during the holiday quarter. Last year saw 21 million iPods sold in the same time period. [AppleInsider]

The New York Observer's profile on iPhone blogger Kristin Sloan got us thinking. Has she reached Ellen Feiss status in the minds of Apple fanboys — you know, the teen whose addled performance and green T-shirt won her Internet fame? Review the orginal Sloan and Feiss commercials and tell us which one is more likely to Jobs your Steve.

But drooling is as far as you're going to get, fanboys. Sloan lives with self-described "creative entrepreneur" Doug Jaeger in New York. Though there may be hope, at least to judge by the story Sloan told the Observer about Jaeger. Apparently, when Steve Jobs announced the device last winter, the couple decided to hold off purchasing iPhones until their second generation. But come June, Jaeger decided he couldn't hold back. He purchased an iPhone.

Have you missed John Hodgman, The Daily Show's "expert," since the writers' strike started? Well, he's back in action, reprising his role as "PC," joining Robert Scoble's bid to urge Vista users to not give up on Microsoft. The campaign appears to make use of an especially vicious form of keyword targeting: Here, it appears on CNET's Windows Vista page.

Before Jonathan Ive, there was Robert Brunner, the designer behind Apple's original, iconic PowerBook. Brunner, who left design firm Pentagram this summer and now has a new product-design studio, Ammunition, worked with Amazon.com's Lab126 unit, also staffed with Apple veterans, to design the Kindle e-book reader, a source tells us.

Look where baiting Apple fanboys gets you. Yesterday we noted that the top-selling digital music device on Amazon.com was not the iPod but Microsoft's Zune. Commenter deathbychichi made quick work of this assertion.

So I walk into the Apple Store at 10 a.m., and there's already a 90-minute wait for repairs at the Genius Bar. I spend the next hour commiserating with another writer with a broken Mac, as whiny iPhone owners and WAAHHHHH IPOD NO PLAY students hog the line. Yes, I friggin' know that if I had spent another $100 on an Apple ProCare account and scheduled an appointment ahead of time and blah blah blah mwah mwah — give it a rest, iJerks. My Pro account had expired without so much as a warning email. What I really want is a separate service line for those of us with real, work-stopping computer problems so we needn't sit and watch those of you with bricked vanity phones because you tried some trick off Gizmodo.

T-Mobile Germany was ordered in a court injunction to sell iPhones without a contract. Today it announced it would sell the iPhone no-strings-attached for €999 ($1,477) — significantly higher than its normal €399 ($590). In addition to selling without a contract — which, incidentally, AT&T will let you do, but only if you have bad credit — the injunction also orders T-Mobile to sell an unlocked version of the phone. The company has announced that any customer who asks can have the SIM lock removed. But what a price jump! Our analysis after the jump.

Successful rap producer Jermaine Dupri probably didn't win any friends for his Huffington Post entry defending Jay-Z's decision to sell his new album American Gangster online only as a full album. Dupri may not be a polished spokesperson, and no one wants to hear, "Why do people not care how we — the people who make music — eat?" Not when it comes from someone tied as the sixteenth wealthiest hip-hop mogul. Or when that person also gets to sleep with Janet Jackson. But — I can't believe I'm saying this — Dupri is right. Of course, artists should have the right to determine how their creations are packaged. In admitting that it's about money, too, he's just being honest. Music is a business. It's about coming to mutually agreeable terms with the customer, not catering to his every whim. Even Steve Jobs lets musicians sell songs on Apple's iTunes in album-only packages. Ultimately, if consumers really have a problem with the way they do business, the artists will fail. That's their right, too.

Jeff Bezos, sitting in an office in Seattle, is basking in the credit for Amazon.com's new Kindle e-reader. But who really deserves credit for it? Lab126, an Amazon subsidiary in the heart of Silicon Valley — Cupertino, Calif., Apple's hometown. With former Apple and Palm employees running the quasi-startup, some have speculated that Lab126 might be coming up with an MP3 player or handheld computer. Instead? The Kindle, which many have dinged for a design that hardly matches the iPod or Treo. ("The Pontiac Aztek of e-readers," says a friend of blogger Jason Kottke.) The good news: Lab126, which now openly takes credit for the Kindle, is hiring two more designers. If you want to do something about the Kindle's design, now's your chance.

The iPod, which along with the iPhone was to propel Apple's Wall Street value beyond even Google's, is not even the bestselling digital media player on Amazon.com. That laurel belongs to some Redmond, Washington-based company called Microsoft. Heard of it?

Vodafone Deutschland has won a temporary injunction against T-Mobile Deutschland, Apple's German iPhone partner. The injunction orders T-Mobile to stop requiring iPhone purchasers to sign a two-year contract. A further hearing on the matter is scheduled for two weeks from now. [WSJ]

U.K. album sales are down 11 percent for the year to date and it's been a slow holiday season so far. British music retailers blame record labels for worrying about digital piracy too much. Kim Bayley, director general of the Entertainment Retailers Association, told the Financial Times her members specifically want labels to quit insisting on using digital-rights management code that prevents customers from making copies and playing the music on multiple devices. Bayley said research indicates consumers are about four times more likely to buy DRM-free music than DRM-encoded music. Apple, Amazon.com, and others already sell DRM-free music online, but the selection is limited.

Talk about spoilers. Bloomberg News reports that Judge Jeremy Fogel has dismissed a lawsuit claiming Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his executives lied to shareholders about backdating 6,428 stock-option grants issued from 1997 to 2002. With apologies to Fake Steve apologists, there's no longer any reason to read Dan Lyon's Options, a fictionalized account of the legal troubles Jobs faced over the backdating scandal. (Except for the fact that it's howlingly funny.) Even Lyons's ending is less of a letdown than this.

Apple tracks how iPhone owners use the "Stocks" and "Weather" widgets installed on each device, Uneasysilence claims. All mobile devices possess a unique International Mobile Equipment Identity number, and as the screenshot below indicates, the iPhone sends its user's unique IMEI to an Apple server each time the widgets perform a query. The data includes which stock ticker was queried.

It's great to see the Valleywag Robert Scoble Challenge pay off. Over the weekend our boy committed an act of journalism: He called bullfeathers on Apple's brand promise — yes, we really talk like that out here — after a normal update to the new Mac OS X rendered his computer unusable. The hundreds of angry, unself-aware comments from Apple jihadists are priceless. My fave: "scoble doesn't know mac 101 basics like the decades-old firmware-based startup options used for trouble-shooting." This from a loser who can't find his Shift key. (Photo by Brian Solis)

No need to bother with transcripts. Here's a clip of Fox Business News's scoop from this morning. FBN reported Apple purchased 8.1 percent of chipmaker AMD. But then, oh wait. Never mind. Still, sounds like it would have been a real swell idea.

You know, it's real easy for the press to sit back and mock Apple fanboys. But though the cult of Jobs doesn't require the worship of zombies and the ceremonial consumption of divine flesh as do more popular cults, its rites of passage can be just as trying for the devoted. On this point, Fox's MadTV eloquently elaborates in music and lyrics.

Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman, in a startling change of heart, proclaimed that the music industry is, at least partly, to blame for its current woes, mentioning something about a misplaced war with consumers. With that off his chest, Bronfman launched into a full-fledged groveling routine, proclaiming Apple's iTunes store a paragon of digital music. He went on and on, praising the genius of selling individual tracks, the user interface, and billing platform. Bronfman even threw unnecessary praise towards the iPhone — like we need to hear from a music guy what makes for a good cell phone. Why all the posterior-smooching? Bronfman is realizing that tough talk isn't helping it get out of "indecent" pricing schemes when it comes time to renew Warner's contract with Apple.

A British journalist attempts to ask Apple executive Phil Schiller a question about the effective iTunes monopoly on downloads for the iPhone. Apple's PR people jump in and try to end the interview, saying how they're "excited" about the iPhone and "want to stay focused." The problem? Their body language betrays them. This is why Apple is really screwed if it ever loses Steve Jobs: He's the only guy at Apple who can actually pull off this act and handle the press convincingly while parroting the party line. Everyone else at Apple who's even allowed to speak to reporters just ends up looking robotically defensive when they try to erect a Jobsian reality-distortion field.