Have you ever thought about just how much stuff is on display in an Apple store? Those Macbook, iPhones, and iPods are probably worth hundred of thousands of dollars. Apple products aren’t cheap, after all.

Maybe that’s why these crooks targeted an Apple store in Marlton, New Jersey for a seemingly well-plan heist. The result was that five men were able to nab 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones, and 9 iPod Touches. The kicker? The thieves were able to steal all of this stuff in exactly 31 seconds.

Video obtained by WPVI-TV highlights the tremendous efficiency of the operation. They quickly broke the glass and grabbed a range of Apple gadgets in speedy fashion, all while threatening a security guard with a possible firearm. Their faces were also covered to elude identification by the security tape. These are not your ordinary crooks.

We’ve included the shocking video below. Let us know your thoughts about this crime in the comments:

Tags: apple, Apple Store, iphone, robbery

Before You Upgrade, Part 1: Clean Up Your Mac

You don’t want to take those applications you haven’t launched in months, giant log files, superfluous startup items, and even old documents you don’t need anymore into Snow Leopard, so the first thing you want to do is give your Mac the virtual hose-down. Audit your data, applications, and login items; run some maintenance, and give the old hard drive a checkup with Disk Utility. Here are detailed instructions on how to clean up and revive your bloated, sluggish Mac.

Before You Upgrade, Part 2: Back Up Your Data

Before you crack open that pretty Snow Leopard box, get yourself an external FireWire drive and run a full backup of all the important files on your Mac. If you’ve got Leopard now you should already be running Time Machine, so make sure you’ve got a fresh new backup completed. If you’re still on Tiger, here are a gaggle of free Mac backup utilities for you to use. (But seriously, if you don’t already: get a FireWire drive. Back up your Mac. Now.)

Before You Upgrade, Part 3 (The Extra-Paranoid Track): Make a Bootable Backup of Your Mac

Maybe you go through the entire Snow Leopard upgrade process only to realize that your one, essential, company VPN application isn’t yet compatible. Maybe you accidentally lose files or apps in the upgrade process, or you just decide you hate Snow Leopard and want to go back to Leopard stat. One great way to ensure you can go right back to your working Mac’s state before an upgrade is to mirror the current state of your Mac on a bootable external hard drive. Even if you’ve got a Time Machine backup, grab another external drive and clone your Mac’s internal hard drive. With a bootable clone on hand, if anything goes wrong or you just want to boot back up into your old Mac’s environment (settings, apps, data, and all), you can do so by holding down the T key Option key, restarting your Mac, and choosing the clone as your bootup disk.

The Upgrade Path to Snow Leopard

To install Snow Leopard on your Intel-based Mac, Apple recommends you go from Leopard using the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc, or go from Tiger using the $169 Mac Box Set. Here’s Apple’s full set of system requirements.

The important thing to know is that you can only install the $29 upgrade on top of an existing Leopard installation. That is, you can’t start with a formatted Mac hard drive and install Snow Leopard only, which is kind of a bummer for geeks who like to do totally fresh, from-scratch installations.

Correction and update: We have confirmed that the preview of Snow Leopard DOES offer a standalone installer that works on a freshly-formatted hard drive without an existing Leopard installation or DVD. While we can’t absolutely say before Friday whether or not the final release will work this way, it’s very possible it will. (Read: The full version of the new Mac OS X may be just $29.) My apologies for the mistake! Thanks to commenters RudolphDer and dark42 for asking!

Upate #2: Confirmed: $29 Snow Leopard installs whether or not you’ve got Leopard.

Choose one of two methods for the upgrade.

Upgrade Method 1. Install Snow Leopard Directly on Top of Your Existing Leopard Setup (Easy)

If you’re already running a relatively clean installation of Leopard, and you want to make this update as easy, fast, and painless as possible, you’re just going to pop your Snow Leopard DVD into your Mac’s drive and go. I did this using the Dev Preview of Snow Leopard on a well-used and cluttered Mac, and things went just fine. This is the upgrade path Apple wants you to take and suits most folks—with a good backup, you’ve nothing to fear. The only possible disadvantage to this approach is that some old logs and system files you don’t need might stick around.

Upgrade Method 2. Wipe Your Mac Clean and Start from Scratch (Advanced)

Serious nerds who want their Snow Leopard installation absolutely pristine (and come from the Windows school of wipe-and-reinstall) can go all-out and format their Mac’s hard drive, reinstall Leopard, upgrade to Snow Leopard,, install Snow Leopard and then restore their data from backup and reinstall all their essential apps.

The one advantage to this approach is that you can take the opportunity to repartition your Mac’s hard drive in the process (though if it’s Boot Camp you want, you can set that up any time, not just when wiping your drive). You’ll also know for sure your Mac is completely cruft-free. The disadvantage to this approach is that it’s tedious and time-consuming. The Snow Leopard installation can take 45 minutes to an hour, then you’ve got to restore your Time Machine backup (depending on how much data we’re talking, this can also take up to an hour) and then you’ve got to reinstall your applications.

If you do decide to go this route on Snow Leopard upgrade day, here are a few notes:

• Only start once you have your Leopard DVD and Snow Leopard DVD in hand, and your data backed up.
• Inventory your Mac’s application list. Command-line lovers can do a simple ls /Applications/ >> appsiuse.txt to get a textual listing of everything in the Applications folder. Otherwise you can just eye your Applications folder and note down its contents. Also check your System Preferences panes for any panels you’ve installed there.
• After you’ve inventoried your applications and backed up your data, insert your Leopard DVD and click on “Install Mac OS X.”
• Insert your Snow Leopard DVD and click on “Install Mac OS X.” When you reach the Snow Leopard Installer’s “Welcome” screen, from the Utilities menu, choose “Disk Utility…” From there you can (say a little prayer) and format or repartition your Mac’s internal hard drive. Once that’s done, continue with the installation as usual.

You get a few opportunities to restore your Time Machine backup during the Snow Leopard installation. Even if you pass each time, once Snow Leopard is completely installed, you can get your data out of Time Machine by running the Migration Assistant (located in /Applications/Utilities/).

One important thing to know about restoring a Time Machine backup: you can’t be logged in as the same user name that you’re restoring. That is, if I’m logged in as gina, and my backed-up Time Machine user is also gina, the Migration Assistant either makes you rename the restored user or log in as another (admin) user to do the restore. The Migration Assistant also lets you decide what you restore: which data (in predetermined folders/categories, like Music, Pictures, Documents, etc), all of your Applications (or none), settings, and other files. Here’s what that looks like:

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, can’t wait to get her paws on the Snow Leopard box. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

You could do worse than Bjarne Tveskov, who took the happenstance of a 7″ photoframe that looks quite like the screen from his favorite iMac G4 and decided to create a mini-version of it using LEGO elements.

The model lacks actual computer hardware but the screen can display videos, images and TV (there’s a digital TV tuner built in to the photoframe).

More images at Tveskov’s blog.

Another photo of a supposed Apple Mac Mini prototype has surfaced online. The image could give a glimpse into Cupertino’s as-yet unannounced refresh of the popular desktop computer.

The photo shows Apple may be considering beefing up the ports, including adding a fifth USB connection, retaining its mini DVI port as well as its recently-introduced Mini DisplayPort and swapping out a FireWire 400 port for the newer FireWire 400 connection.

“This is the second picture of a Mac mini seen by AppleInsider with such a port makeup, the first of which we were asked not to publish,” the news site told readers Friday. The first photo was described as a prototype from late 2008.

In January, AI reported the new Mac mini would offer both video connections and an NVIDIA chipset.

A MacRumors user known only as ‘monthly,’ supplied also supplied the photo to that Apple fan site. The user described the prototype as including a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and an ATA Super Drive.

Not content to diddle around on the iPod touch screen, David Lasnier made a stylus that he uses to draw with the Brushes app, producing results like his cat skull sketch above.

His first attempt involved an Allen key with a sponge tip (far left) but Lasnier hit on using the knife blade holder (center) sans knife, stuffed with a sponge. The resulting brush is very precise because the head is clean and firm. He dubbed it the “Free Capacitive Stylus, ” for  instructions, see Flickr.

As Lasnier told Cult of Mac: “I loaded a painting app for my iPod touch because I draw a lot. It was more out of curiosity than with a real project in mind. One day I made a little stylus while at my day job, and eventually, one small object at time, began to do it seriously. In a month I made 40 little paintings.”

Lasnier has taken inspiration from what surrounds him at said day job, including staple removers, an iPod jack and pencils.

All images copyright David Lasnier, used with permission.

Hat tip to Studio Tota

Microsoft used an image of an ambling snow leopard licking its chops for the backdrop to its Live Search homepage on Thursday, prompting a few in the business and technology press to speculate why.

Among them, Ina Fried at c|net is likely furthest from the mark, with her suggestion Microsoft could have been showing a player’s tell that Live Search will be the default search engine in Safari’s tool bar when the next version of OS X launches.

Fried suggests that because Microsoft has money to spend and because it might be willing to do so in order to get the market share boost for Live Search that such a deal would bring, well, she admits the idea is a “crazy” one, but she put it out there any way.

Why it won’t happen: Apple doesn’t need the money and has almost never made it a practice to co-brand its products with services that suck.

The Cult team members are not famous for colorful desktops, but when I saw this little beauty I felt it deserved some link love. This gorgeous desktop picture (and its slightly spikier sibling) are now available for free from the generous hands of Wolfgang Bartelme, having recently made something of a splash of their own on Flickr.

Wolfgang is no stranger to design gorgeousness, having also created other desktop and iPhone wallpapers like Dashball, ColorFlow, and ColorFlow 2.

Download and enjoy.

Now there are two. Apple Thursday told service agents it will no longer support the 20-inch Cinema Display, leaving its new 24-inch LED Cinema Display and older 30-inch version as the only external display options.

In a bulletin, Apple said the 20-inch Cinema Display had reached its End of Life. As a result, the Cupertino, Calif. company would cancel any pending orders.

The news prompted speculation Apple may soon end support of the 30-inch display, leaving just the new 24-inch LED display designed for Apple laptops.

Apple stopped producing the 20-inch Cinema Display in late 2008 and Cupertino’s main distributor, Ingram Micro UK have none of the displays in inventory, according to Apple Insider.

In 2008, Apple discontinued its 23-inch HD Cinema Display when introducing the LED 24-inch Cinema Display.

Apple may refresh its line of Cinema Displays by introducing a 20-inch model that supports the new Mini DisplayPort, according to reports Thursday.

Jonathan Zdziarski, creator of the first iPhone forensics toolkit,  has developed a new iPhone app called AMBER alert, aimed at helping find kidnapped children in the US.

These alerts are issued when missing child cases are granted Amber status –  kidnappings of children under age 17 who police believe to be in danger of  bodily harm or death.

Zdziarski’s  iPhone application will provide a real-time feed of recent alerts including victim photos and information, suspect photos and descriptions, vehicle photos and descriptions and a reporting mechanism allowing users to report sightings.

The Amber Alert program was created in 1996 after the kidnapping and killing of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman from Arlington, Texas.

The free app is pending approval by Apple.

Via MacNN