Apple Talk Weekly: Altered landscape

Welcome to the third edition of Apple Talk Weekly, a roundup of some of the week's top Apple product news, legal happenings, and answers to your questions.

While this week was a quiet for Apple on the product front, it was big one for some of Apple's main competitors, one of which invested, with another divesting in businesses that Apple is involved in. Both moves are going to have a long-term impact on the mobile device and PC landscapes.

The week started out with Google making a surprise announcement that it was purchasing Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The move gives Google a big chance to strengthen its legal ground with Android. That's important given the litigation Apple has going against companies like HTC and Samsung and their devices that run on Android.

Just days later, HP dropped the bombshell that it plans to spin off its PC business, as well as discontinue its efforts with WebOS, the operating system it bought as part of its acquisition of Palm. While WebOS was no Android in terms of marker share, or momentum, it's one less competitor for in the mobile device market--something that opens it up to Apple and others.

Read on to get the full week's highlights, and the answer to a reader question on where those free app cards are at Starbucks.

Apple news of the week

Mac OS X 10.7.1 released
Apple gives Lion its first update with this release. You can read more details about it on our post, but the long and the short of it is that it fixes a handful of bugs. Mac users with a new model MacBook Air and Mac Mini users got a slightly larger version of the update, which fixed system-specific bugs.

iOS 5 beta 6 released to developers
Apple released another beta of its iOS 5 software to developers yesterday. This one was mostly a bug-fix update, but it also turns out it brings the phasing out of unique device identifiers (or UDID). That's basically the serial number that could be read by applications, and what was used by third-party analytics and advertising networks. TechCrunch spotted the note about it in Apple's NDA'd release notes.

You can now get Lion on a $69 USB stick. Note that this is the recovery stick Apple used to ship with the MacBook Air.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET) Lion on a $69 USB drive goes on sale
For those without broadband, or without a thumb drive to make their own Lion recovery tool, Apple's now selling its own. The $69 stick, which is more than twice the price of buying a $29.99 copy of Lion from the Mac App Store, effectively takes the place of buying the software on an optical disc.

More renderings of Apple's new campus surface
Following the renderings of Apple's new headquarters released in June, the City of Cupertino released new renderings, including floor plans. Especially noteworthy is the subterranean theatre, parking and research and development lab. Oh yeah, and the whole thing is bigger than the Pentagon.

3G MacBook prototype pops up on eBay
Okay so this isn't an official Apple release, but over the weekend a MacBook Pro with a built-in SIM card slot and magnetic 3G antenna was briefly on eBay. The buyer posted pictures and a highly-detailed description of the notebook, which was pulled down at Apple's request, right around when bidding was north of $70,000

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20094871-248/apple-talk-weekly-altered-landscape/#ixzz1VZozxOqR