Most Apple (AAPL) rumors will eventually come true — if you wait long enough.

The hot one this weekend, launched by AppleInsider and embellished by the sites that feed like pilot fish on its scraps (see here), is that the company has told its resellers that supplies of iMacs — Apple's most popular desktop computer — will be "constrained in the immediate future."

"A sign," writes AppleInsider's Katie Marsal, "which this late in the product's life-cycle 'only means one thing' — namely that the company is drawing down inventory levels ahead of new models." (link)

A nugget of news like that is all the Apple rumor mill needs to start its speculative engines, spinning out all sorts of putative specs, from an Intel quad-core CPU to a Snow Leopard operating system.

One reader in a MacRumors forum has already posted a tentative iMac price list (from $999 for a 3.00 Ghz dual-core model to $1,899 for a 2.83 quad-core machine). Another predicts that the new models will be unveiled Sunday, Feb. 1, in a high-profile Super Bowl ad harkening back to the one that launched the first Macintosh 25 years ago. (link)

But before you get out your credit card, you should know that reports of impending iMacs have been kicking around for more than five months. They started August 27, 2008, four months to the day after the last iMac refresh.

How do we know this? Because MacRumors tracks such things, including stats like days-since-update (278), in its helpful MacRumors: Buyer's Guide.

Here, in chronological order, is the official Buyer's Guide history of this season's crop of iMac rumors:

• Aug 27, 2008: iPods, Notebooks, and… iMacs before the Holidays?
• Sep 24, 2008: New Mac Part Numbers Found in Future Shop's Inventory? [Update]
• Oct 17, 2008: New iMacs Still Coming Before Holidays?
• Oct 28, 2008: Buyer's Guide Update: iMacs, Mac Minis, and Mac Pros
• Oct 31, 2008: Whispers Suggest a Mid November iMac and Mac Mini Update
• Nov 03, 2008: Apple: No New Products Before Holidays
• Nov 19, 2008: Apple Waiting on Quad-Core Desktop CPUs for January?
• Dec 19, 2008: Evidence that Next iMacs and Mac Minis to use NVIDIA Chipsets
• Dec 23, 2008: New iMacs Shipping January 2009?
• 01/04: Macworld San Francisco 2009 Rumor Roundup
• 01/12: Macworld San Francisco 2009 Rumor Wrapup: Winners and Losers
• 01/20: Apple to Use Newly Released Quad-Core Desktop Processors?
• 01/26: Analyst Speculates on iMac Delays: Quad vs Dual Core?
• 01/30: Limited iMac Availability Suggests Possible Refresh

See also: Why the iMac is late

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here's five grand worth of Apple (AAPL) news in charts and lists released over the past couple of days.

1. Web Brands. Apple scored No. 10 in Nielson Online's ranking of the top Web brands based on the number of unique visitors each site drew in December 2008 — which isn't bad considering Apple.com's focus is so much narrower than the brands it's up against, like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN). (link)

2. Social Brands. The iPhone scored No. 1 — ahead even of its parent company at No. 3 — in the Vitrue 100, a new ranking launched this week by an Atlanta-based marketing company with a deliberately misspelled name. Vitrue's list ranks blue chip brands by how often they get mentioned in blogs, photo-sharing sites and such social media entities as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter — presumably a measure of how large these names loom in the minds of an emerging category of early adopters.

3. Days to 1 Million. This comes from an Engadget reader named Noel F. who used published sales data to compare the rate at which the leading smartphones achieved the market penetration milestone of 1 million units. However, as Engadget's Tom Ricker notes, this leaves out the important factor of geographical footprint at launch. The Google Android G1, for example, launched only in the United States. The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 21 countries. (link)

4. Volume vs. Revenue. CounterNotions's Kontra uses data from GigaOm's Jose Fermoso to demonstrate that what matters is not how many smartphones you sell, but how much you make on each sale. Unfortunately, both writers' comparisons are a bit off since Apple's Q1 numbers include revenue and earnings not just from iPhones, but also from Macs, iPods and other goodies.

5. Stock Price. Finally, a glance at Apple's share price, which having suffered a thousand cuts in the past year finally picked up a little traction in the past two weeks.

For much of last year, AT&T (T) Mobility's websites seemed to be promoting every cell phone in their arsenal except for the iPhone — as if the company wasn't sure the revenue coming in from iPhone users was worth the steep bounty it was paying Apple (AAPL) for each sale.

No more.

Today when you visit its website, a promo for the iPhone 3G ("Now Available Online!") is often the first thing that pops up  — and based on the fourth quarter results the company released Wednesday, you can see why.

The iPhone is still an expensive proposition for AT&T. The kickback to Apple — between $288 and $432 per phone over the life of a 2-year contract, according to various estimates — and the $450 million the company says it spent last quarter on network upgrades to provide high-speed 3G coverage, contributed significantly to the 23% year-to-year decline in AT&T's quarterly net income (to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion).

On the other hand, Q4 revenues were up 2.4% (to $31.1 billion) in a tough economic climate thanks to results in the wireless division that CEO Randall Stephenson attributed largely to the iPhone.

"The success of our iPhone 3G launch has driven wireless growth and helped redefine the wireless data space," he said in a press release.

How did the iPhone do that? Let us count the ways:

1. AT&T has activated 4.3 million iPhone 3Gs since its launch, 1.9 million in Q4 alone — more than double its iPhone activations one year earlier.
2. The average revenue from Phone users is 60% higher than the typical AT&T customer — thanks to that $30 per month data fee. Their heavy use of Web services helped drive AT&T wireless data use up 51.2% year to year, which as reader Jon in Brentwood, Calif., points out is not necessarily a good thing.
3. About 40% of the iPhone activations this quarter were new AT&T customers, either buying their first cellphone or switching from another carrier.
4. The churn rate — the percentage of customers who drop AT&T's service — among iPhone owners is significantly lower than the rest of the network, sharply reducing marketing costs.

Although iPhone 3G activations were down 21% quarter to quarter — to 1.9 million from 2.4 million after the device's July launch — they still outpaced Research in Motion's (RIMM) much hyped BlackBerry Storm. According to one estimate, Verizon (VZ) has activated some 1 million Storms in its first two month of sales.

In the end, they split it down the middle.

On Tuesday, International Business Machines (IBM) announced that it has resolved the lawsuit against a newly appointed senior vice president at Apple Inc. (AAPL) that was, for a brief moment last November, the hottest story in technology — a bi-coastal drama that pitted one of the world’s largest and most established computer companies against one of the brashest.

The case involved Steve Jobs' decision to hire Mark Papermaster, a 25-year IBM veteran, to replace Tony Fadell as head of the iPod/iPhone division. (Fadell, once considered a rising star in Cupertino, was said to be stepping down to devote more time to his family, according to Apple's press release.)

IBM complained loudly and litigiously, arguing in a 10-page complaint filed last October that Papermaster was "in the possession of significant and highly-confidential IBM trade secrets and know-how" — secrets he was now in a position to deliver to a major competitor. The case rested on a noncompete agreement that Papermaster signed in 2006.

IBM management seemed to believe that the iPod division job Papermaster had been given was a subterfuge — a "placeholder," as PBS columnist Robert Cringely put it, until the noncompete year was up and Papermaster could take the job for which Cringely and others believed he was really hired: “to lead Apple’s PA Semi acquisition and create a new family of scalable processors optimized for Snow Leopard and beyond." (link)

Papermaster's lawyers argued that Apple and IBM were in totally different businesses and besides, noncompete agreements are not enforceable in Texas (where Papermaster worked for 17 years) or California (where Apple is headquartered).

On Nov. 7, a U.S. district court judge granted IBM a preliminary injunction, ordering Papermaster to "immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc."

A week later, Papermaster's lawyers filed their counterclaims. Two days after that, the judge ordered IBM to put up a $3 million bond to guarantee payment of any costs or damages, should it turn out that the injunction should not have been issued.

Things got very quiet after that.

Then, on Tuesday, IBM issued a statement that reads, in part:

"IBM and Mr. Papermaster have now agreed on a resolution of the lawsuit under which Mr. Papermaster may not begin employment with Apple until April 24, 2009, six months after leaving IBM, and will remain subject thereafter to all of his contractual and other legal duties to IBM, including the obligation not to use or disclose IBM’s confidential information. Following commencement of his employment with Apple, Mr. Papermaster will be required to certify, in July 2009 and again in October 2009, that he has complied with his legal obligations not to use or disclose IBM’s confidential or proprietary information. The preliminary injunction will be replaced by a court order under which the Court will have continuing jurisdiction over this matter, including compliance enforcement powers, until October 24, 2009, one year after Mr. Papermaster’s departure from IBM."

So Papermaster had to wait six months, not 12, before he could take the job at Apple, and he has to promise to the court that he will abide by his noncompete.

Apple's press release says only that "litigation between IBM and Mark Papermaster has been resolved," and adds that Papermaster will be reporting to Steve Jobs on April 24.

Case closed.

Here's the link to the consent order and stipulation of "dismissal with prejudice," that the two parties worked out on Jan. 24.

See also:

• The Papermaster chronicles

• Papermaster was misquoted
• IBM puts up $3 million in Papermaster case

Good news is hard to come by these days, so here's a nugget about a business that's found a silver lining in the economic clouds.

I grabbed breakfast this morning with Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia, a privately held software-as-a-service company that sells a browser-based version of Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange e-mail that customers use for a pay-as-you-go monthly fee. Sofinski's business isn't immune to the economic climate – he didn't see much growth last year, and December was rough – but he says things have been looking up in January. (Intermedia is cash flow positive, according to Sofinski, so it doesn't have to worry about hitting up investors for funding during the downturn. )

In particular, Sofinski is seeing an uptick in business from individuals signing up with the service. He's guessing it's recently laid off workers who are striking out on their own and want the type of e-mail they're used to from the office.

But that's not the shiniest part of the silver lining. It turns out that Intermedia, which has about 200 employees, has a team of 25 engineers in St. Petersburg, Russia, who do a lot of the nitty-gritty software coding. The Russian economy and its currency, the ruble, have taken a dive lately with the steep drop in oil prices. But what's bad for Russia isn't so bad for tech companies.

The ruble's troubles do a couple of things that help Intermedia. For starters, it makes those engineers less expensive, since many of Intermedia's customers pay in dollars and the engineers get paid in cheaper rubles. More important, Sofinski said, it makes it easier to hire and retain top talent. "It's nice to pay 10 percent less for an engineer, but that's not my big concern," he said. "I can get a quality engineer who gets the work done faster."

That's not great news for American engineers who are looking for work and have to compete with sale-priced Russian coders. But for tech companies that are pinching pennies, a ruble saved is a ruble earned.

A POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters have suggested that if companies are going to look overseas for programmers, they should do the same for management. It so happens that Sofinski, the Intermedia CEO, is Russian himself, and graduated from a school in St. Petersburg where his software team is now based. He works out of New York now, so he doesn't qualify as outsourced labor – but he's not your typical U.S. executive, either. (INTC) (AAPL) (CRM) (DELL) (EMC)

Tim Cook must have known.

One day before Apple's acting CEO told Wall Street analysts that his company would not stand for having its intellectual property "ripped off" — a remark clearly aimed at certain iPhone-like features of the Palm Pre — the U.S. Patent Office awarded Apple Patent No. No. 7479949.

This 358-page document, originally filed on Sept. 5, 2007, is the mother of all iPhone patents. Signed by 21 Apple (AAPL) employees — starting with Jobs, Steven P. and Forestall, Scott — it covers everything from the way a finger or fingers touch the screen to the heuristics that turn those touches into commands.

Other smartphones introduced since the iPhone came out have avoided using the multi-touch technology covered by this patent. The Palm Pre may have crossed the line. See Apple vs. Palm: Geeks with grudges.

Patents in the United States are enforced through civil lawsuits in Federal court. The patent holder will typically ask for monetary compensation and an injunction prohibiting further violations.

In order to prove infringement, the patent owner must establish that the accused infringer practices all of the requirements of at least one of the claims of the patent. The accused infringer has the right to challenge the validity of that patent, something Palm has already suggested it plans to do.

“If faced with legal action,” a Palm spokesperson said last week, “we are confident that we have the tools necessary to defend ourselves.”

Palm (PALM) shares were down more than 10% in mid-morning trading, but had made back half those losses by mid-afternoon.

Kudos to Alex Brooks of World of Apple for spotting the news.

Where was the new iMac that Apple watchers expected Steve Jobs — or rather, Phil Schiller — to unveil at Macworld?

In a report to clients issued Monday, Kaufman Bros.' analyst Shaw Wu says it will be out before March, or June at the latest, and he offers three reasons that the refresh of Apple's best-selling desktop machine is running behind schedule. According to his latest supply chain checks:

1. Apple hasn't yet decided whether to power the new iMac with Intel quad-core processors or newer dual-core processors with larger caches. "While quad-core would provide a material improvement in performance and potentially  jump start sales," he writes, "it could cannibalize the Mac Pro, its high-end tower."
2. Apple computers tend to run hot, and the iMacs vents and cooling systems may need to be redesigned, he says, "to deal with higher heat dissipation."
3. The timing of Snow Leopard — the next-generation Mac OS X announced by Steve Jobs last June but still without a firm release date — could be an issue. "While Leopard would take advantage of multiple cores," he writes, "Snow Leopard takes it to the next level with better support for multi-core, multi-processors, and OpenCL, with enhanced graphics capability."

Wu points out what last week's earnings report made abundantly clear: Apple's desktop machines are due for an overhaul. The company's desktop business was down 25% year-to-year in the quarter that ended in December. Only boffo sales of the MacBook and MacBook Pro — up 34% — saved its Mac numbers from going south last quarter.

Wu is sticking with his Apple (AAPL) price target of $120 a share, which as he points out is 11 times free cash flow earnings for the calendar 2009, by his estimate, but only 7.5X if you exclude Apple's enviable $28.1 billion cash hoard.

The bad blood between Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) that bubbled to the surface last week has a history that long predates Palm's launch of the Pre, a smartphone that flatters Apple more sincerely than any of the other iPhone imitators.

When asked at Apple's earnings call last Wednesday how the iPhone was going to going to stay ahead of competitors nipping at its heels, you could hear the heat in acting CEO Tim Cook's answer.

"We think competition is good. It makes us all better. And we are ready to suit up and go against anyone.

"However," he added, his voice rising, "we will not stand for having our IP [intellectual property] ripped off, and we'll use whatever weapons that we have at our disposal. I don't know that I can be clearer than that." (link)

Cook had been asked about the Pre's multi-touch interface, whose technology Steve Jobs insists is heavily protected by multiple patents and which other iPhone competitors — Google's (GOOG) Android, for example — have been careful not to use.

Palm was quick to respond to what it perceived as a shot across its bow.

"If faced with legal action," a spokesperson told Digital Daily, "we are confident that we have the tools necessary to defend ourselves."

But the bad blood between Palm and Apple goes deeper than a patent dispute, as my colleague Brent Schlender presciently pointed out when the venture capitalists at Elevation Partners made their first big investment in Palm — a $325 million cash infusion just a few weeks before the iPhone hit the market.

In a column written at the time of the loan, Schlender noted that both the giver — Elevation partner Fred Anderson — and the receiver — Palm executive chairman Jon Rubenstein — had long, complex relationships with Apple.

Anderson, who was Apple's CFO from 1996 to 2004, before he became a venture capitalist, had just reached a settlement with the SEC over his alleged role in backdating Apple stock options — including hundreds of millions of dollars worth for Steve Jobs. At the time of his settlement, Schlender reminds us, Anderson "denied any wrongdoing, paid a fine, and issued a vaguely antagonistic statement disputing Jobs’s account of the options backdating. Clearly Anderson felt he had been thrown under the train."

Rubenstein's relationship with Jobs is even older and more complex. It dates back to 1990, when Jobs asked him to run hardware engineering at NeXT. Rubinstein came to Apple with Jobs' return in 1997 and played a key role in developing some of the revitilized company's most profitable products. As Schlender tells it:

"Rubinstein … who was instrumental in developing the iMac, the PowerBook, the Power Macintosh, and the iPod, retired quietly a little over a year ago, on April Fools Day, 2006 — the 30th birthhday of Apple. Interestingly, about six months before that, he gave a rare interview to the Berliner Zeitung in which he threw water on the idea of converging a cellphone and an iPod media player into a single device — basically what is now the iPhone. “Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee?” he asked. 'There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine,' Rubinstein argued. 'It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices.'

"Strange words, considering that Apple’s iPod group was already working on what would become the iPhone. Stranger still, when you look back and see that Apple publicly announced Rubinstein’s upcoming 'retirement' less than three weeks after that interview. I think you can safely surmise that Ruby, who had been with Jobs for more than 15 years at both NeXT and Apple, wasn’t on the same page with his boss." (link)

At the unveiling of the Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show three weeks ago, Rubinstein introduced the device by first talking about how he retreated with his family to Mexico after he left Apple to lick his wounds — a surprisingly personal way to launch a new cellphone. (You can watch him here in the Palm-supplied video that shows us more of Rubinstein than we ever saw in his years at Apple.)

Once at Palm, it didn't take Rubinstein long to start raiding his former employer for engineering and marketing talent — including senior vice president for product development Mike Bell (a 16-year Apple veteran), director of software Chris McKillop (of the iPhone and iPod team), and spokesperson Lynn Fox (out of Apple PR).

So did Palm, in fact, rip off Apple's intellectual property? Patent attorneys could be arguing that question for years to come. Meanwhile, Palm partisans have begun laying the groundwork for their defense, leaking to reporters a white paper prepared by Microsoft's Bill Buxton that traces the history of multi-touch back to IBM's Type and N-key Rollover. (link)

Meanwhile, the exuberance with which the tech press initially greeted the Pre (it won Best in Show and rave reviews, for example here and here) is being tempered by the sour reaction of Apple partisans. Perhaps the sourest of the lot is Daniel Eran Dilger's long screed in Roughly Drafted Magazine, in which he repeatedly refers the still-unreleased Pre as a "demo" and compares it to a "bald man's combover." (See The Emperor's New Phone.)

The Pre is scheduled to go on sale in the first half of 2009. A price point has not been announced, although outsiders have speculated that it will be somewhere between $249 and $399. The iPhone retails for $199 (8GB) and $299 (16GB).

The famous Ridley Scott "Big Brother" commercial — shown once on Super Bowl Sunday, Jan. 22, 1984 — was only a teaser.

The Mac's real 25th birthday dates from Jan. 24, when the machine went on sale and a dapper-looking Steve Jobs — dressed in double-breasted blazer and green bow tie — unveiled it at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts near Apple (AAPL) headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

You're likely see clips from the Super Bowl ad more than once this weekend. (It's pasted in full below the fold.)

But my favorite video from the launch of the Macintosh is the one recorded 25 years ago at the Flint Center by Scott Knaster, restored and digitized by TextLab, and available today on YouTube.

It's a lovely period piece, with plenty of cheesy Jobsian stagecraft and a crowd that goes nonlinear over features we now take for so much for granted, the effect is unintentionally comical.

The Flint Center video:

Below the fold: The Ridley Scott commercial.

See also:

• Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac

More

I'm not sure I buy it, but Slate's Karim Bardeesy makes an interesting — if slightly tongue-in-cheek — case that Apple owes it to the country to join the ranks of the money changers.

The situation is dire, he says. The giant banks that took those taxpayer billions last fall aren't lending it out, and credit is getting desperately tight. "If only someone, some company could step up as an act of duty for which they would receive the reward of profit."

The company he has in mind, of course, is Apple Inc. (AAPL), with its storied brand, proven retailing instincts, fanatical customer base, zero debt and $28.1 billion in cash.

"Imagine what would happen," Bardeesy writes, "if Apple sequestered just half of this cash as seed funding for its new bank and set aside $2.5 billion of that half for capital and startup costs. At regulated reserve ratios, that means the company could lend out up to $100 billion to hungry consumers and businesses." (link)

"The personal-electronics giant," he writes, "is a personal-finance giant in waiting."

Apple's bank wouldn't need to be a giant to have an impact — or to make a profit. "This would be a niche bank," Bardeesy suggests, "taking deposits disproportionately from Apple consumers and lending for the kinds of ventures that, well, your typical Apple consumer might be undertaking: creative small business projects, distressed urban lofts, student lending, hybrid vehicles, and renewable energy."

Would Steve Jobs do it? Not likely. One of the ways he's nurtured the company back to health is by sticking to his knitting and not indulging in diversionary acquisitions or enterprises.

Besides, the Apple Bank name is already taken, by a 50-branch brick-and-mortar outfit in the Big Apple.