I love this stuff. Sidwalk art like you’ve never seen before.

Amazing.

From AllThingsD and John Paczkowski comes word that Acer CEO J.T. Wang has seen the light. No more cheap hardware, and instead will focus on the so-called ultrabook market, as epitomized by Apple’s MacBook Air.

We will shift our strategy to improving profitability from pursuing market share blindly with cheap and unprofitable products. Ultrabooks will become our key growth driver next year as customers want a lighter, thinner notebook with longer battery life. Selling more ultrabooks will also help improve our profit margins as they command higher prices.

Translation: We’re not making any money on market share and cheap goods.

There’s a room with a view, and then there’s a store with a view. The latest in pretentious, ostentatious retail locations is the new Grand Central Terminal Apple Store in New York (Flash Alert!).

Instead of browsing around the store, it’s more like hiking around the store.

When is an iPad not an iPad? When it’s an iPad in China. From MarketWatch:

Apple lost a trademark dispute in China, where it had accused Proview Technology Shenzhen Co. of infringing on its iPad trademark. A Chinese court rejected the lawsuit, according to reports Tuesday citing Chinese media, ruling that Proview — a unit of Proview International Holdings Ltd, — had lawfully registered the “iPad” name as far back as 2000 for use in China and other countries.

Apple bought the rights to use the iPad name in all those countries except China. Proview’s asking price to sell the iPad name to Apple? $1-billion.

Thanks to the internet and a plethora of apps which bring me the news, I stopped buying newspapers and magazines a few years ago. 2011 must be the year of the aggregator. My favorite new app, both iPad and iPhone, is Flipboard.

Dozens of publications, updated all day, only a touch away. Nice. Did I mention it’s free? This is not a business model that I understand.

We shop at a few stores which have a self checkout system. Walmart, Safeway, and Home Depot. Overall, the experience is mixed. Whenever the self checkout doesn’t work it takes longer to finally make the purchase and leave the store.

The local Apple Stores now have a self checkout called EasyPay. Geek.com has the details, but it’s simple. Add the EasyPay app to your iPhone. Use the iPhone’s camera to scan the bar code of the product you want to buy. Confirm the purchase. Walk out of the store.

Whoa.

Here’s where it gets really crazy. Apparently Apple says that they aren’t going to be regularly checking the purchases. So you can then just walk out of the store with your bumper, no personal interaction required. If somebody does stop you, just flash the EasyPay receipt, which is easily found within the app. How the company will avoid serial shoplifting without checking every order is beyond me, but it was leaked that Apple employees were nicknaming the program EasyTheft.