What was a rough day for everyone on Wall Street was especially tough for Apple.

The company was on the wrong end of a pair of analyst reports which predicted slower sales numbers for the company in the personal computer arena. One report suggested that Apple's bread and butter, the $1000-plus computer market, is slowing and that Mac sales will take a hit as a result.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the impending Wall Street Bailout plan was scrapped by congress, sending stocks into a panic and pouring a generous helping of salt into Apple's wounds.

The result, an 18 per cent drop in the company's stock price, the largest drop in Apple stock in almost a decade.

The day was rough on tech stocks in general, with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo taking hits as well. While it's not the sort of bloodbath seen in the valley during the dot-com bust, certainly it was a bad Monday in the tech world.

Well, those of you looking to help offset the cost of your new iPhone by suing Apple for locking in the battery are out of luck. A judge has thrown out the suit filed against the company by a customer in Chicago.

The suit had alleged that the company did not properly inform potential iPhone owners that the handset's battery was soldered into its casing and could only be replaced by sending the device into the company.

The judge didn't quite see it that way. He noted that not only common sense would tell you that eventually the battery would need to be replaced, Apple does too on its packaging. As such, the Judge tossed out the suit.

Normally, this blog tries to refrain from recommending or condemning any specific products. In this case, however, I'm going to make an exception.

Don't use the new iTunes Genius feature. Not if you value the credit card you have connected to the store, at least. It's just too damn good, and if you're anything like me, you'll spend more in two hours than you've spent on iTunes downloads in the last two months.

For those of you that haven't yet updated, Genius is the new feature in the iTunes store that takes a look at whatever it is you're currently listening to and puts together a list of albums and songs that you don't own yet but no doubt want to. And of course, each suggestion has a little "buy now" button so you can shell out your cash before you have time to give it a second thought.

Some people say Genius is just like online music service Pandora. Baloney. If Pandora is the "suggested listening" rack at the record store, Genius is the cute clerk who leans over the counter and says "ooh, I love that band. Have you heard of these guys? I'll just go ahead and add it to your pile and you can put it back if you hate me."

Now, we've all had our moments of e-commerce shame. Who hasn't come to after a night of hard drinking to find that you somehow bought a set of collectible bagpipes on eBay while in your drunken stupor?

But this is different. Genius is devious, it's calculating, and it slips out with your money faster than you can say "impulse buy."

And, of course, it will be great for Apple. iTunes song downloads were already selling like Evian in the Sahara. With Genius, they may start moving so fast Apple will need to rent the National Debt clock just to keep tally.

If my first impression was any indication, Genius will be huge. And I'll be stuck eating ramen noodles by candlelight for a while.

PC-dom; it's not just for awkward, intellectual satirists any more.

After dumping Jerry Seinfeld and the "commercial about nothing," concept after just two installments, Microsoft is taking aim at Apple's ongoing campaign.

The idea is to have PC users everywhere declare "I'm a PC" in the same fashion as Apple star John Hodgman in an effort to remove the stigma suggested in the Apple ads. Among those who Microsoft has enlisted to be "PC's" are Dr. Deepak Chopra, actress Eva Longoria with husband Tony Parker, and of course Bill Gates himself.

Users will also be asked to submit their own "I'm a PC" shots. Hopefully, it will turn out better than the last time Microsoft let its users handle the publicity.

Surely, Apple will take the high road here and not bother to reference the campaign in future Mac/PC ads...

There never seems to be any shortage of iPhone-related drama to go around these days. The latest saga involves some disgruntled developers who are more than a bit sore over being denied distribution in the iTunes store.

The claims range from Apple pulling apps without explanation to the removal of apps which are deemed to work a little to much like Apple's own products.

Certainly these claims aren't without a great deal of merit. Honestly, it seems that Apple is being pretty unfair in some of these cases. But nobody should be too shocked, really, this sort of thing should have been expected.

One of the most prevalent themes in Apple's culture is that anything they do, it's done better than anyone else in the world, or it's not done at all. Steve Jobs has publicly stated that the company does not make products he isn't proud to sell, and it's pretty apparent that Steve himself isn't proud of anything less than a masterpiece.

The philosophy has certainly worked out well. It's brought out some of the most iconic electronic devices in the last half century, and many of us out there swear by the Mac.

Unfortunately, the side effect that comes with that is that when you believe you've made a product better than everyone else's, you also tend to conclude that anything anyone does to your product will only make it worse.

Apple considers its products works of art as much as they consider them computer gadgets. And if you've ever seen an artist while gallery workers handle his/her work, you know how edgy they can get. The idea of anyone but you messing with your masterpiece just drives you up the wall.

You can imagine then, how Jobs and Co. reacted when people started wanting to hack away at the iPhone. Those who made the iPhone under the belief that they were doing something nobody else in the world had done or could do (and you can bet that was the theme Saint Steve hammered home early on,) and now everyone wanted to get in there and poke around and re-write everything.

It's understandable then why Apple would be slow to embrace the concept of developers making software for the iPhone, and even slower to open it up to the idea of selling everyone else's software under the iTunes banner.

This isn't simply an iPhone thing either. One of the main reasons the clone program was killed was the belief within Apple that nobody else can make a Mac as well as Apple can. iTunes and the iPod remain tied up in part because putting either on third party hardware would be a downgrade from an Apple-only product. Not playing well with others is hard-coded into this company's DNA.

It's also why you'll never see Apple develop something as open as Android. If something can be done by Joe Schmoe in his spare time and be "good enough" to be sold, Steve Jobs isn't going to want to associate it with his brand. Apple is all about facilitating art in others, but only to the extent that it's not Apple's form of art.

Apple will never buy into the crowdsourcing movement for its products because Apple, by necessity, has to believe that it does what it does better than the crowd ever could.

Is that mode of thinking unfair? Most definitely. Undeserved? perhaps. But you have to admit, it's turned up some pretty cool stuff.

You remember that big nasty flaw in the DNS system that threatened to send the whole of the interwebs into chaos? Well, it only took them a couple of months, but Apple has finally gotten around to fixing it on the iPhone.

Not that you were at a great risk; the issue mainly affects servers, and I don't know of too many people right now using their iPhones as DNS servers. Still, it has to make you frown a little that Apple is being this lackadaisical with getting security fixes out for what is currently its rock-star product, especially seeing as how Microsoft and others had fixes out for their client systems. Eventually, all this feet-dragging is going to come back and bite Apple in the butt.

Speaking of the Borg, Microsoft has apparently hired a couple hundred Vista 'gurus' to hang around your local electronics store and give demos explaining precisely why you should upgrade your copy of Windows XP.... and your graphics card... and your CPU... and your hard drive... and your RAM....

Don't get too smug, Maccies. I'm guessing the gurus won't be any more face-punchable than some of the Apple salespeople and 'Genius' bar types. Let's face it, Apple has been doing this same thing for several years now, they just have their own storefronts to contain it in.

If the latest Apple evt was any indication, the hard-drive based iPod has fallen out of favor with Steve and co. The company has done away with the "chunkky" iPod classic model and opted to only sell the slimmer, 120 GB model. This also leaves us with just one iPod left that uses an actual hard disk drive for storage, rather than solid-state flash memory chips.

It would certainly appear that the disk-based iPod is setting up to go the way of the ball-powered mouse and ResEdit, but the question is why.

The immediate response would be that hard drives are a dying medium, particularly for media players, where the old head and disk model doesn't go well with such things as jogging or rushing up stairs. Some people are now even speculating that a large-capacity solid state model is in the works.

I wouldn't be so sure though, even with the recent price drops and breakthroughs, an 80 GB solid-state hard drive still runs about $600. Nobody is going to pay more than a few hundred dollars for an iPod these days, and most within the industry still think it will be at least a couple of years before SSD's become cheap enough for use in consumer products.

What we could be seeing, however, is the death of the large-capacity iPod. Ever since the nano hit that 8GB mark, it has wiped the floor with pretty much every player, and it's not just because of the pretty colors. There's only so much music you really want in a player, and a few thousand songs is more than enough for most people.

I myself find my old 20GB iPod more than large enough, and have so for four years, barring a couple reformats that lead to reloading my library.

There is the video aspect, but even then, there are only so many moments in a day when you want to watch video on a 2.5 inch screen, and not nearly enough to warrant loading an extensive library on your iPod.

Perhaps Apple has found that, for now at least, anywhere from 8-32GB is enough for just about everyone, and the era of the ever-expanding iPod is slowing.

Perhaps realizing that lying to your customers didn't really make the best national ad campaign, Microsoft has released a new set of ads.

Instead, Microsoft has enlisted Jerry Seinfeld to do what he does best...a commercial about nothing. The 90-second spot involves Seinfeld and Bill Gates in a churo-eating shoe-buying possibly homoerotic exchange that ends in the conclusion that Vista is somehow similar to a pastry.

Though Microsoft's duo has a just a wee bit more star power and wealth than Justin Long and John Hodgmen, the GatefFeld effort pales in comparison to the "get a Mac" series, and provides an odd parallel to another episode in the Redmond/Cupertino rivalry.

Apple's ads: Simple, elegant, understated, lots of white, and a constant air of smug elitism. Hello, these ads are an iPod.

Microsoft's ad: Clumsy, bizarre, tedius, and propped up solely by name recognition and truckloads of cash. Microsoft's answer to Apple's ads is a lot like its answer to Apple's MP3 player.

In a move that is sure to cost the company in the 9-16 year-old male demographic, Apple rejected an iPhone app called "pull my finger" from the iTunes store.

No, Pull My Finger isn't not a clever name for a reminder tool or a comedy-themed game, it's an actual description of the app. You slide your finger along one of 18 images on the iPhone to trigger any number of fart sounds.

As it turns out, Apple has a rule against selling what it deems to be goofy, useless stuff on the App Store, and Pull My Finger was rejected.

The person making the decision has obviously never felt the need to free up a bus seat.

The app's creator is hoping that the video will garner enough support for lobby Apple to reinstate Pull My Finger.