Why Facebook wanted Instagram: It's a simple app that does one thing really well, and its users love it.

John Gruber: "Optical drives are the new floppy drives."

Roundup of today's Apple launches.

"It's an actual store selling actual products but is obviously not affiliated with Apple in any way."

Nice roundup of the current iPhone and iPad rumors.

John Gruber: "Will the iPad’s long-term share be more like the iPod’s or the Mac’s? High-end and market-dominant? Or high-end but niche?"

Could Facebook compete with Apple's App Store?

A kickstarter project to bring letterpress typesetting to an iPad app.

Will Apple's new campus stifle innovation in the long run?

"About 50 percent of Apple Store customers who need to get their iPhones swapped have never plugged them into iTunes after the initial activation and sync."

"It’s the lesson that so many hardware and platform vendors can’t seem to learn: the pretty skin isn’t why people like Apple products, and applying a pretty skin over your products won’t make them compete better with Apple’s."

Reeder, the best Google Reader client, is now available for the Mac. It has built-in Readability support so you can see the full text of articles, even if only a short snippet is available via RSS.

"You can use your phone while it's being synced with iTunes."

Short summary of what's new and why it's important.

“One of the things I learned at Pixar is the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other.”

"I can’t think of a single telecom service that is as restrictive as the phone number: email can be accessed from any device, Skype makes apps for nearly every platform, IM works across any number of clients, there are web-based messaging solutions that transcend platforms entirely."