Back in January, blogger Seattle Rex announced that he would be suing Apple over issues related to his 2008 MacBook Pro that appears to have suffered from an NVIDIA graphics card failure . According to Rex, the graphics chip on his top-of-the-line 17-inch MacBook Pro began to flake out late last year, two months after his AppleCare extended warranty expired, and a month later the machine died completely, refusing to boot.

Marking the first significant piece of data to help build a picture of Apple's quarterly iPhone sales numbers ahead of next week's earnings release, Verizon today announced its own earnings results for the first quarter of 2012, revealing during the associated conference call that it activated 3.2 million iPhones during the quarter. The number is down from 4.3 million iPhones in the previous quarter, which was part of Apple's record-setting launch quarter for the iPhone 4S that saw the company sell 37 million iPhones worldwide. Analysts are generally expecting Apple's iPhone sales for the first calendar quarter of 2012 to be down slightly from that 37 million number, and Verizon's results certainly support that belief, at least in the United States

A few more interesting items are starting to leak out ahead of CES 2012.