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Later this month AT&T will finally do away with dedicated iPhone insurance plans and introduce the device to its standard mobile insurance plan at $4.99 a month.

As my colleague Mike Elgan points out, the iPhone has changed the world in profound ways.

Now an ex-colleague, Brian Chen of Wired.com, has just published one of the first books to take an in-depth look at how, exactly, the smartphone world is shaping up.

Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In is an excellent overview of how the iPhone is changing the computing landscape.

I follow Apple closely, yet I was surprised at how much I learned about the world of mobile from Chen’s well-reported book (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb).

Personally, I don’t quite understand what’s so special about an old Apple prototype, especially one that doesn’t work. But clearly someone does, because this iPhone 4 prototype is currently getting bids of over $1,700 on eBay.

Have you noticed how Apple and Google have been going round in circles recently? Both OS X Lion and Google’s new Facebook challenger, Google+, sport circular frames around their user photos.

If you are planning on using Target Disk Mode to boot your Mac equipped with Thunderbolt ports you’ll need Apple’s special Thunderbolt cable in order for it to work. This is required even when connecting two Macs or a Mac to an external Thunderbolt equipped disk drive.

Apple has released the Gold Master build of the next version of of its Mac OS X operating system to developers, meaning that 10.7 Lion could see release to the public as early as next week, exclusively through the Mac App Store.

For users looking to upgrade, this is uncharted territory: the first OS X upgrade to be delivered digitally. To help you prepare for Lion and guarantee your machine is one hundred percent ready to upgrade the second Lion drops, we’ve put together this handy guide.

Here’s how to prepare your Mac for Lion, and do it right.

Apple has started to issue refund checks for MobileMe subscriptions. My check arrived from Apple today. Have you gotten yours? And I know what you are thinking — yes I’ve spent mine already. On Apple stuff no less.

If you haven’t asked for a refund it might not be too late.  Here’s the information about MobileMe refunds for those of you that might have missed the news last month.

For a few minutes this morning, a working version of Comex’s much anticipated Jailbreakme 3.0 hack was leaked to the web, allowing users who visited a special site on MobileSafari to jailbreak their iPad 2s running iOS 4.3.3.

The leak’s since been taken down, but it was confirmed to work by multiple users to be a working jailbreak, and Cydia is now working on multiple iPad 2s through the userland exploit.

The iPhone turned 4 this week. And in that short amount of time, Apple’s smartphone has made a huge impact on the world as we know it. In fact, the iPhone is probably the most influential consumer electronics product ever made.

Here are the 12 ways iPhone has changed the world in only four years.

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It’s not clear who received the greater slight in this case. A resident in Wilmette, IL recently reported the theft of an Apple iPod which had been left in the cupholder inside an unlocked vehicle. There were also two tickets to an upcoming Chicago Cubs game inside, and the glove compartment and trunk were reported searched.

The iPod was taken. The Cubs tickets were not taken. Looks like Cubs fans aren’t happy, the team is currently 10.5 games back in the NL Central. Are things really that bad?

[via TribLocal Wilmette]

We’ve got the fabulous MacBook Air, MacBook, MacBook Book Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, and now the Mac Faux.  The Mac for people who already wasted their money on something else, but don’t want to be left out. It might not look that good, but now you have another idea about how to carry your favorite snack around. I’m sure that notebooks sporting vegetables aren’t far behind.

It looks like artist Christo got to the iconic glass cube of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store. Too bad for all those tourists who came to take pictures of one of the Big Apple’s most snapped attractions.

Hey, here’s something new in the new OS X 10.7 Lion Gold Master: a handy little introduction to how to use the new multitouch gestures which loads as soon as you boot up Lion for the first time. Neat. We’ll delve in more today and over the weekend and report what else is new, but that’s such an obviously new addition it’s impossible to not just knock up a quick post about it.

Hot on the heels of the OS X Lion Gold Master release is the release of Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 7 for Lion. The world’s best developer tools are only getting better. Kudos to Apple on this new release. But what’s new in the seventh version of Xcode 4.1?

One of the cool new functions of iOS 5 is the ability to set the iPhone’s LED to flash for various system level alerts… but how useful is that functionality when the LED is on the back of the phone?

Not very. That’s why sources are now saying that the iPhone 5 will boast dual LEDs, one on the front, one on the back. Like a Blackberry!

With the Gold Master of Lion now released, the question becomes: when will end users be able to download the latest version of OS X 10.7 through the Mac App Store. We’ve heard July 6th, we’ve heard July 19th, but now a new source is positing a new date: July 14th.

Guess what’s just been seeded to developers? The Gold Master of OS X 10.7 Lion… the last developer seed before Lion becomes available for download to all Mac users through the Mac App Store. What a way to start off the holiday weekend!

In a sign patents are playing an increasing role in protecting marketshare, Apple and a group of other companies paid an ‘unprecedented’ $4.5 billion to keep Nortel patents away from Google. How will the 6,000 patents be used? First stop, sue the pants of Android, experts predict.

The New York Times has issued an update to its iOS apps today that now allows users to subscribe to paid content through in-app purchases. The change comes a day later than the June 30 deadline Apple imposed on subscription apps that must now provide a way for users to sign up without being redirected to a website.

It’s become a pattern for consumers – word of a new Apple device puts the brakes on purchases of the current version. Verizon Wireless is now seeing that as Apple fans hold off buying the iPhone 4 to wait for the iPhone 5.

Rather than focusing its efforts on its diminishing smartphone business, it seems RIM may be planning to launch a device that will rival the Apple TV, packed with PlayBook hardware.

Apple’s developer betas of future versions of iOS are just that, betas, which means that there’s all sorts of problems that can come up when you install one. Total device meltdown, though? That’s the sort of thing that ought to be ironed out in alpha, yet that’s just what at least one iOS 5 Beta user is reporting after installing the dev preview on his iPad: massive, device crippling overheating issues. And Apple says it’s a known issue.

Should tablets be classified alongside notebooks as Mobile PCs? HP has its fingers crossed and hopes no as the rising popularity of the iPad could see a new mobile PC king crowned in 2012.

In a bid to tempt unhappy customers away from Apple’s Final Cut Pro X, Adobe has slashed by the price of its Premiere Pro professional video editing software by 50%… but will its ploy be a success?

Companies within Apple’s supply chain are currently preparing materials for the production of the iPhone 5, which they believe is likely to launch this September… but it may not be launching alone. Instead, it will be accompanied by the iPad 3.