Mac-fanboy blogger John Gruber posted an Amazon.com affiliate link for his readers to order Apple's new operating system, Leopard, on his website. So far, 579 orders have been placed — a $5,800 haul for Gruber, and $77,000 for Amazon. Not bad for a 5-minute post. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Warner Music is threatening to pull out of Apple's iTunes, continuing the trend started by an angsty Universal Music Group. Record labels and Hollywood studios alike are upset by Apple's inflexibility on pricing. Warner's contract is up at year's end, and is considering a switch to a month-to-month deal, as Universal has done. [Washington Post]

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster — who, incidentally, has a fake blog, which, we're told, is much more amusing than the real Gene — raised his price target on Apple to $250 a share, up from $225. At $250, Apple's market cap would be $218 billion — higher than Google. After that, tech-stock comparisons are hard to find until we get to Microsoft, currently at just over $300 billion. Apple would need a share price of $350 to top that. BUY BUY BUY! [MacDailyNews]

Got 30 seconds? Read my summaries of the early reviews of Apple's new operating system in Thursday's papers. Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, New York Times reviewer David Pogue, and USA Today's Ed Baig agree: Time Machine backups, yay. See-through menus, boo.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates that AT&T pays Apple $18 a month per iPhone. And, after some quick math to figure in research firm iSuppli's July estimate that it costs $265 to build each device, which retails for $399, others are now estimating Apple profits $565 per iPhone over two years. No wonder Jobs felt so comfortable shafting the early adopters who paid $599 for their phones.

Hotel Chevalier, a 13-minute short film from director Wes Anderson starring that kid from Rushmore and wannabe lifecaster Natalie Portman, has been pulled from iTunes, the only official place to download the film. It was originally released as a promotional item for Anderson's latest release, The Darjeeling Limited. Hotel Chevalier serves as a prelude to the feature and is most notable for showcasing Natalie Portman's first nude scene. But now, when you search on iTunes for "Hotel Chevalier," nothing is returned, and clicking on the iTunes link on the film's official home page displays the error message above. We're not quite sure, yet, why it's unavailable from the Apple store (Apple PR has not returned a call for comment), but Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider thinks the move was made because the short film might be heading to theaters. After the jump, a gratuitous screenshot of a semi-nude Portman from the film.

ITunes is exclusively offering Led Zeppelin's digital box set (includes all of the band's recorded tracks) for preorder. The $99 bundle of 165 songs works out to 60 cents a — ahem — pop. Who says Apple isn't willing to be flexible with its pricing? [Ars Technica]

Six years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod. Have you heard of it? 110 million units later, more than a third of Apple's revenue comes from the iPod and music-related businesses and AAPL shares are up almost 2,000 percent. What would Fake Steve Jobs say? "Suck it, Dell." Get a blast from the past with the iPod intro video, after the jump.

So Apple is worth more than IBM and the iPhone is just as much a success as all the hype would have you believe. Sick of it? Well take heart, Apple-loathers. The New York Times reports Apple's iTunes store is failing to sell films as well as the company had hoped. Apple "is in a little bit of a crisis now," Forrester analyst James McQuivey tells the Times. "If they can't get the content soon they stand to lose whatever momentum they've gained." (Photo by daniel_cosman)

AT&T reported 42 percent year-over-year revenue growth after completing its BellSouth merger. The company said it added 2 million subscribers since the iPhone launch. Says Fake Steve Jobs, the faux leader of AT&T partner Apple: "Enough! Dear Leader appreciates your love and affection." [NYT]

Apple's third quarter was a blowout all around, but the real question is how the iPhone is faring. Now that we've got a quarter's worth of data, we can compare it to the competition, and gauge the effect of blogosphere scandals like the recent episode of iPhones "bricking" after a software update — sure, tech pundits got worked up, but did people stop buying iPhones? The bottom line: Steve Jobs & Co. entered a daunting market and performed quite well.

In today's earnings call, Apple estimated that around 250,000 out of 1.4 million iPhones — 17 percent — were purchased with intent to be unlocked. No details were given about how the company came to this conclusion, but we surmise it was the number of iPhones sold minus the number of iPhones activated with AT&T. [MacRumors]

After Apple's phenomenal earnings report this afternoon, AAPL is up over 7 percent in after hours trading to $186.02. This marks Apple's market cap at $161.8 billion — above IBM ($154.23 billion) for the first time ever. Feeling a little blue, IBM? (Image by sarahbaker)

Apple's net income in the most recent quarter was up 67 percent year-over-year to $1.01 per share or $904 million as revenue rose to $6.22 billion. Wall Street's average estimate was 86 cents per share on $6.07 billion. Shows you what analysts know. The company sold 1.1 million iPhones, more than 10 million iPods and 2.16 million Macs. [AP]

"People don't understand that we've invented a new class of interface." — The non-fake Steve Jobs, annoyed because customers fail to realize Apple's iPhones don't require them to choose an action verb after selecting an object. [NYT]

Software giant Microsoft is getting the attention of the geek blogosphere for moving its drag-and-drop Web mashup development tool, Popfly, into public testing. Why? Because it has a cute name? Because it's being pitched to everyday Internet users who aren't developers — women, even? (As if women don't program now.) Because it's being pitched as an easy way to build widgets for popular social networks MySpace and Facebook? For all those reasons, sure. But that's not why you should care about Popfly.

Finnish handheld-computer designer social-network operator cell-phone company Nokia reports that its market share rose to almost 40 percent in the third quarter as international markets bought tons of cheap phones. Whatever. The iPhone has a 100 percent market share in my pants. [IHT]

"YouTube on iPhones was down for three days. Nobody noticed." Phonecasting.com founder Michael Sharp at the Web 2.0 Summit, on why he's sticking to audio for now.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Does Nokia wish it were Facebook? Or Apple? Anssi Vanjoki, an executive at the Finnish phonemaker, can't seem to make up his mind. Nokia's introducing Ovi, a "context-sensitive" social network. Oh, and the N810, with which Nokia hopes to horn in on the iPhone's computer-in-your-pocket market. This is, surely, the ultimate bitches-just-jealous corporate strategy. We can only think that Motorola CEO Ed Zander is delighted to hear his rival's getting out of the phone business.