For those of you who don't know about the Apple stock option scandal: Steve Jobs, in 2001, was granted 7.5 million stock options without the proper authorization of the Apple board of directors. However, it has recently come to light that the scandal is much more serious than initially thought. Someone had falsified the documents that make Steve Jobs look like he had authorization for those stock options. The Securities and Exchange Commission is weighing whether or not to take action against Apple and/or any of the individuals involved, and whether or not Steve Jobs himself could be in trouble is unclear. Steve Jobs returned all the stock options before exercising them.

Apple recently patented a wireless "hybrid" mouse that would lower power consumption. It would be a low powered mouse by only turning on the optical tracking feature when absolutely necessary, leaving a manual scroll wheel to do the rest to save power, making the mouse "hybrid". It would use bluetooth tech to be a wireless mouse. There is no mention on how Apple plans on deploying the mouse (replacing the current Macintosh mouse with this one or selling it as an extra), and there is no specified release date.

On Christmas day, there were a lot of gifts of iTunes store gift cards, and Apple iPods of various flavors. Unfortunately, there were too many new Apple products for the iTunes server to handle. The iTunes server crashed when faced with over four times the regular volume of traffic. And so, anyone trying to get into the iTunes store will have download slowdowns of up to 20 minutes, and quite possibly an error message preventing them from even entering the store. Apple was not available for comment on the situation.

The new gadget from Apple, the iPhone, should be available sometime in January. However, Apple may run into some serious patent/copyright issues. Several Canadian and American businesses have already trademarked iPhone, and Canadian service Comwave has offered it's iPhone service for a long time. How Apple will react to this, and what Comwave's reaction is, only time will tell.

Information on Apple's iPhone leaked

Some specs from about the upcoming Apple iPhone have found their way onto the internet. The Inquirer has a link to a video supposedly discussing the new iPhone and some of its features. The most important details you might be interested in are that it will have independent batteries for both the phone and MP3 player, a touch screen and 4GB and 8GB versions priced at $249 and $449 respectively.