9to5Mac claims Apple's marketing chief Phil Schiller told a fan that the uber-popular photography app Instagram " jumped the shark " after it launched an Android version.

TIME magazine today released its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and two of the selections have close ties to Apple: CEO Tim Cook and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson . Each selection is accompanied by an essay by another prominent personality or close associate outlining why the person qualifies for inclusion in the list. The essay on Cook is written by former vice president Al Gore, who has served on Apple's board of directors since 2003

Kickstarter is a popular place for wild ideas to gain some traction, but sometimes an idea clicks with so many people it's possible to wonder why no one thought of it before. Such is the case with the Pebble digital wristwatch . It uses an e-paper display, similar to the screen on the Amazon Kindle, and connects to the iPhone (and Android devices) via Bluetooth.

Research firm Gartner today released its preliminary personal computer shipment data for the first quarter of 2012, offering up a picture of market performance during the quarter. While Apple experienced only small year-over-year unit growth of over 3.8% and was beaten among top 5 vendors by HP's 6.6% growth, the company did once again outperform the overall industry and its 3.5% decline. Gartner's Preliminary U.S

We typically avoid posting a story each time the Apple Store goes offline for updates. While the Apple online store famously goes offline to introduce new products, it also goes down for routine maintenance. Tonight's downtime is likely related to maintenance or other non-product tweaks, but notably the "We'll be back soon" graphic that should be quite familiar to long time Apple followers has been changed

There are several perspectives on the iPad as a productivity tool. Some knowledge workers thrive on a suite of native apps ; others can't really get comfortable within a text or code-based workflow without a legitimate keyboard and mouse. The "third way" of iPad productivity provides a hybrid environment: familiar Office apps or remote access to existing computers, with varying degrees of customization to incorporate the touch UI atop the traditional desktop

Nuance has released the newest version of its PDF Converter for Mac software. New features introduced include direct connections to cloud services such as PaperPort Anywhere and Evernote, and a FormTyper that converts PDF and paper into electronic forms that can be used online. The release also has OCR capabilities to create searchable PDFs and utilizes the Nuance OmniPage Document Conversion to turn PDFs into word-processing documents and spreadsheets

Apparently, iPad 3 enclosures are easy to come by these days. Earlier today, Repair Labs posted a photo of the interior the iPad 3 rear shell. They concluded that there were some minor changes that suggested a larger battery and redesigned logic board.

( Click here for larger version) RepairLabs reports that it has received a photo of what is claimed to the inside of the rear shell of the iPad 3, comparing the part to the corresponding version found on the iPad 2. The iPad 3 version demonstrates a few minor changes compared to the iPad 2, with one of the most notable being an apparently narrower logic board that could make room for an expanded battery. A

Sprint today became the last of the three major U.S. iPhone carriers to report earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011, disclosing that it sold a total of 1.8 million iPhones during the quarter. While well below the 7.6 million activations reported by AT&T and the 4.3 million activations reported by Verizon , Sprint's iPhone surge helped it achieve a new record high subscriber base of 55 million customers.