Following the recent success of Walter Isaacson’s biography on former Apple CEO Steve Jobs comes another more corporately-focused book on the company that Jobs co-founded and brought so much success to throughout his adult life. Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky brings to light Apple’s (and Jobs’ as well, to a lesser extent) business side and how the company operates instead of the personal coverage that Isaacson’s biography brought.

Apple has quietly made the Apple USB modem incompatible with OS X Lion, which was verified on Cult of Mac when they tried to use their modem and received an error message. While it’s true that most people don’t need or want to connect to the Internet via dial-up and that other USB modems will work if they have updated drivers, some people do occasionally need dial-up, especially for fax functionality.

Like cars in the winter and guitars on long tours, laptops can face some challenging environments when you take them mobile. My “road” or beater computers for the past several years have been a couple of 2000 vintage Pismo PowerBooks that still do a fine job, but would not represent catastrophic hits to my wallet should ill befall them.

Sometimes you just get it right from the outset, and today’s MacBook computers can trace a direct line of heritage and their general form factor back to those 1991 PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 machines. An apt automotive analogy would be Ford’s Mustang, which was so brilliantly conceived and styled at its introduction in May, 1964, that the current 2011 Mustang could not be mistaken for anything else..

Some of you young’ns who hopped onto Apple with the iPod and iPhone may not remember Clarus the Dogcow. But to those of us who grew up with Apple computers, it recalls a simpler time of bombs, wristwatches and sad faces. And hey, speaking of those icons, they’re all now available for purchase from artist Susan Kare as limited edition art prints.

Even if you’re from outside of the productivity space, you’ve probably heard of The Omni Group. With applications like OmniGraffle and OmniFocus, The Omni Group offers software to suit almost every productivity need you may have. And this year at Macworld, they’ve shown up big. I had the opportunity to chat with Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group, about some of the products they’ve launched recently and how they’re doing.

Sunday, January 16th marked the quarter-century anniversary of the Macintosh Plus’s 1986 release. The Plus is widely considered to have been the first real workhorse tool variant of the original compact AIO desktop Macs, with an 8MHz 68000 Motorola processor, able to support up to 4MB of user-upgradable RAM and connect to external SCSI devices, including external hard drives. Other members of the compact Mac family included the 128K, the 512K, the Mac SE, the Mac SE-30, the Mac Classic and the Mac Classic II.

Let’s see…150 MacBook Airs or 1 Apple-1? An original Apple-1, including the original packaging and a letter signed by Steve Jobs, will be auctioned off at Christie’s of London on November 23rd. Originally sold for $666.66 (did you have to include your soul with that sale?), the computer is expected to auction for around $150,000 to $250,000.

Steve Jobs certainly has a way with words even through his emails. While most of his random responses to the probably large amounts of emails he receives on a normal basis are no more than a sentence, they do say a lot. Furthermore, since they are coming from the Apple CEO himself, you know they’re accurate. When emailed from a worrying customer that Apple has been putting too much energy into the iPad and has forgotten about updating the MacBook and MacBook Pro, Steve Jobs urged him simply “Not to worry.”

Perhaps one of the best known sounds in the geek universe is the startup gong that we Mac users hear almost every time we start up our machines. While it in and of itself is just one of the many noises our computers make on a daily basis, it has made quite a name for itself, and is surprisingly calming. After the jump, you will find an extremely fascinating interview held with the creator of this sound: Jim Reekes.