Apple Inc

Within days of buying his iPhone, John Furrier discovered that his 13-year-old son, Alec, was sneaking off with the device and downloading games. To reclaim his phone, Furrier had to buy his son an iPod Touch, which Alec quickly filled up with Pac-Man, Magic 8 Ball and dozens of other games. "When he's not playing on his Xbox 360, he's playing on the iPod," said Furrier, a 43-year-old entrepreneur and blogger in Palo Alto. Apple Inc.'

The annual gathering of the Mac faithful will take place in San Francisco without Apple Inc.'s charismatic leader, Steve Jobs. Breaking with a long tradition, Apple said Tuesday that Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at January's Macworld Conference & Expo, the venue the company has used for more than a decade to unveil products. The decision renewed questions about his health and sent the computer maker's shares tumbling. The opening address Jan.

Now the iPod can answer the question: Am iDrunk? A new product called the iBreath turns Apple Inc.'s iPod into an alcohol breathalyzer. The $79 accessory plugs into the base of the iPod and functions like a field sobriety test. The person using the iBreath exhales into a retractable "blow wand" and the internal sensor measures the blood-alcohol content. Within two seconds, it displays the results on an LED screen. A reading of 0.

Christopher Paolini's "Brisingr," Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and Peter Matthiessen's award-winning "Shadow Country" are among the dozen-plus books coming to the iPhone and to iPod Touch from publisher Random House Inc. "We are pleased to be making this initial list of outstanding books by some of our top-selling authors available to a groundbreaking group of readers," Matt Shatz, Random House's vice president for digital books, said in a statement this week.

In a sign of its growing clout as an entertainment player, Apple Computer Inc. dropped "computer" from its name Tuesday and unveiled two devices that promise further upheaval in the rapidly changing media industry.

Cisco to Apple: We need to talk. A day after Apple Inc. baptized its eagerly anticipated super-cellphone with the marketing slogan "We need to talk," Cisco Systems Inc. filed a trademark lawsuit Wednesday pointing out that it has owned the iPhone name since 2000. Until Monday night, the two companies were negotiating over the name. Cisco, which acquired the name when it bought another company, was willing to "share," Cisco spokeswoman Terry Anderson said. Apple, apparently, was not.

Tomoaki Kurita presides over racks of cellphones lined up outside his shop on a busy sidewalk in Harajuku, Tokyo's catwalk of youth street culture where people attracted by the riot of phone options can stop to flip open and fondle the latest models of what the Japanese call \o7keitai\f7. From behind his busy counter, Kurita giggles when asked about the excitement in America over the arrival of Apple's iPhone, which can also be used to download music and surf the Internet.

Cellphone carriers have long sought the next big thing to produce the sort of revenue they now collect from customers who use their handsets simply for talking. But ring tones, Internet browsing, streaming video, e-mail and a host of other services have failed to take off as expected. All data offerings accounted for less than 11% of the industry's total service revenue in the first half of last year. That's part of the reason even big mobile phone companies that won't be selling Apple Inc.'

Holiday shoppers' affinity for the iPod helped Apple Inc. to a 78% increase in fiscal first-quarter earnings, giving the company a welcome distraction from the controversy about the improper awarding of stock options. Apple's strong results provided some good news for Silicon Valley on Wednesday after tech stocks generally fell in response to disappointing results from Intel Corp., a company often seen as an industry bellwether. Cupertino, Calif.

Call it the high-tech equivalent of a book signing. Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen will show how he uses a Macintosh computer to compose at 7 p.m. on Feb. 15 at the Apple Store, 1248 Third Street Promenade, in Santa Monica. Salonen also will give a sneak preview of his new work, "Helix," to receive its first U.S. performances by the Philharmonic March 30 through April 1 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. It will also be released as part of the iTunes DG Concerts series.