Dan Frommer asks if there’s anything left in Mac sales. Check out the last graph with the Mac and iPad combined and keep in mind this quote from Steve Jobs before returning to Apple:

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing.

Mission accomplished?

Carl Franzen for TPM:

Over the past week, a number of users of the popular photo sharing app Instagram and parent company Facebook have been locked out of their accounts and prompted by both services to upload images of their government issued photo IDs to regain access, as CNET first reported on Tuesday.

Apparently this is not spam.

“This is just a general practice for both Facebook and Instagram to request photo IDs for verification purposes depending on what type of violation may have occurred,” a spokesperson for Facebook told TPM. “Unfortunately, I can’t share more with you beyond that as we don’t go into details beyond that.”

You know who else asked to see people’s papers, right?

Brian S. Hall, who likes Apple’s chances against Amazon:

Apple makes more in profits each quarter than Amazon has *ever* made.

Oh, well.

Hey, I got out of AAPL at $550! I’m sittin’ pretty right now. On, uh, $210. Still.

Carl Howe on Twitter:

Time to play the quarterly game: if AAPL had AMZN’s P/E ratio, it’s stock price would be $161,048 and its market cap would be $150 Trillion.

And:

With Google’s PE, Apple’s stock price would be $1,017 and its market cap would be $947 Billion.

Fun!

CNBC’s Jon Fortt:

So perhaps the bigger problem is that Apple failed to get ahead of this story. Think about it:

Apple knew in the summer, before the most dramatic part of the stock’s upward climb, that the story was going to get tricky at the end of the year with a massive multiproduct rollout. Apple could have signaled then, while investors were still feeling good about the stock, that this would be a different kind of year as the company prepared for the future.

See also: Maps.

If there’s a valid criticism to be made of Tim Cook, it might be this.

Palm CEO Edward Colligan’s response to Steve Jobs’ attempts to intimidate his company into a no-poaching agreement:

“Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,” Colligan wrote in an email sent to Jobs declining to accept his offer.

How easy is it to punk certain members of the tech press? Pretty easy, turns out. Surprise! And by “surprise” I mean completely predictable.

(via Matt Alexander)

Over at Macworld you will find a piece by me that uses humor and hard cold facts to make the case that while current iPhone 5 sales figures are interesting, what’s important is what comes next. And it’s almost always worth the wait.

I’ve ruined yet another episode of The Talk Show. This time John Gruber and I talk about Apple’s stock price, what it is about Apple that drives people insane and other topics of interest.