Bono gave a red iPod to the Japanese Prime Minister hoping to encourage more support from Japan to combat African poverty. Yasuo Fukuda asked Bono if his music was preloaded on the device. "No, but you can download it."

Apple beat the street with its 2008 first-quarter earnings, but the company is pitching a low forecast for the coming months. It's expecting earnings of 94 cents a share on $6.8 billion in revenues for the second quarter. We're liveblogging the conference call as Apple explains that one to investors.

Remember the comparisons between Amazon's Kindle and the iPod? Don't try them on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The Kindle was a bad idea, Jobs told the New York Times after yesterday's Macworld keynote. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore." Mmhmm, Mr. Jobs. And whose fault is that?

Apple's iPod doesn't just dominate our pockets. It's reshaping how we listen to music in the home. The Consumer Electronics Association forecasts that speaker systems with iPod docks — everything from clock radios to fancy Bose players — will exceed sales of traditional compact shelf systems and home-theater-in-a-box systems (those fancy surround-sound stereos the Best Buy salespeoople keep pushing on you). The iPod speaker system market will grow an estimated 23 percent in 2008 to $1.07 billion, while the market for non-iPod stereo systems will slide to $1.04 billion. Since most stereos have built-in CD players, this sounds another death knell for the once-ubiquitous music disc. (Photo by Señor Codo)

Michael Bull, a film and media professor at England's University of Sussex, has spent three years interviewing more than 1,000 iPod owners — only to reach the most obvious of conclusions. In the process, Bull dubbed himself Professor iPod and won a book deal. The book, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, holds no revelations: People carry their digital content around with them, relying on it to get them through the day. iPod owners use the devices to create personalized, controlled environments insulated from the dislocation of their work lives and the cacophony of the city. Is it any shock Apple found his research worthless?

Is Steve jobs turning into an overprotective nanny in his old age? As Apple continues its attempt at world domination through well-designed products and heavy advertising — at one point I saw Apple ads on four TVs simultaneously at my local sports bar, thanks NFL Sunday Ticket! — it's good to know that the company is looking out for our eardrums. Apple has gotten a patent that illustrates a technology for an automatic volume control. Your next iPod could calculate how long you've been listening to music at high volume, and reduce the volume for a "quiet time" before allowing you to increase the sound to full volume again.

iSuppli tore apart the iPod Touch. Turns out it's not just a broken iPhone. WIthout all the phone components to clutter things up, the Touch is thinner and has room for more memory. And, at $147 in parts per device, the iPod Touch costs Apple about $120 less to make. Then again, it doesn't reap the iPhone's service-fee kickbacks.

The Web is deriding Microsoft's decision to rename PlaysForSure, its digital rights platform, as "Certified for Vista." It's actually a rare sign of intelligent life in Redmond's marketing cubes. PlaysForSure never spawned the hoped-for army of iTunes killers, and Microsoft itself created another format for its own Zune, kneecapping any stores foolish enough to adopt PlaysForSure.

Apple's iPod may command 77 percent of the U.S. MP3 player market, but that dominance has yet to carry over internationally, Apple marketing exec Greg Joswiak told Fortune. In Europe, for example, the iPod has 58 percent market share in the U.K., but only 28 percent in Germany and France.

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]

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.

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?

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.

There's one thing dorky-sexier than Barack Obama: An iPod Touch, the $300 toy that 20 percent of New York University students would trade for their vote in the next presidential election. Downside: Anyone who wants an iPod that bad is clearly a wimpy latte-sipping liberal, meaning that Giuliani just needs two hours at that fancy New York Apple store to rule the country. Upside: Anyone who'd answer a poll like this is better off watching some video than talking to me.

Microsoft wants to buy Musiwave, a company specializing in mobile music services. The deal, among other things, would lay the foundation for a Zune wireless store, matching Apple's iTunes Store for Wi-Fi that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users download songs over the air. This copycat move is just one more sign of what's wrong with Microsoft's Zune strategy. It can't settle on one — so it just winds up latching onto whatever is the hot topic of the day. Here's what Microsoft should be doing instead of copying Apple.

Great, now I have to destroy my iPod. And I love my video iPod. I've named it "GodPod" in my iTunes. But this coaster I spotted at Uneasysilence? It's just too much for me, fanboys.

Time has named Apple's iPhone its invention of the year. The iPhone is a big deal, but not for any of the reasons Time cites. The nonrelease of the Googlephone just highlights what Apple gets about consumers, and what Google doesn't. Apple knows how to design not just gadgets, but the businesses that go around them. And as a result, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is worth more than Google within two years.

You'll recall NBC's noisy departure from Apple's iTunes store in August. First we heard the problem was that NBC had asked Apple to raise per-episode prices to $2.99. Then, we heard Apple advocated cutting prices to 99 cents a show, arguing that volume would make up for lost profits. Now, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker reveals he misplayed the negotiations even more than we could have imagined. He asked for a piece of Apple's iPod hardware sales.

Not exactly. Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day, its ad agency, invited Haley to Los Angeles to participate in a professional remake of the ad. But let's ignore the fact that TBWA completely redid this supposedly up-from-the-grassroots effort. TBWA's chief creative officer, Lee Clow, is talking the loser-generated talk: "People's relationship with a brand is becoming a dialogue, not a monologue." But plucking a good idea from the public sphere to use for themselves is nothing new for the iPod maker. Acknowledging the original producer? Now that's new.

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.