Vaporware alert! Back on the topic of terminally shameless misappropriations of Apple's product designs, do you mind if we quote ourselves from about a week ago? In reaction to the LUXPRO Super shuffle (which looks so absolutely identical to Apple's iPod shuffle that even the blind and congenitally mute raised an eyebrow and said "wow, bring on the lawsuit"), we said: "Is LUXPRO just counting on selling a ton of these things long before a judge can tell it to stop? Or was it never really planning on going into full production in the first place, and only made the prototypes to generate media buzz and draw traffic to its other products?" Answer: the second thing.

At least, that's what faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort tells us is being claimed by a reader over at Engadget. Apparently this guy called up LUXPRO and talked to a salesperson and "two senior execs" at the company to discuss a manufacturing arrangement. Reportedly these people told him that the whole Super shuffle thing was nothing more than a publicity stunt, intended solely to "leverage the media attention created by Apple to their advantage." To that end, "the Super shuffle is not in production," and LUXPRO never intended to put the Super shuffle into production. But what they do produce is the guts inside the alleged Super shuffle, complete with specs as advertised, and they're "looking for companies to hire LUXPRO to build uniquely designed players, based around the same electronics inside the Super shuffle." Ooooo, sneaky.

The plan worked, of course, since LUXPRO obviously got a zillion times more media coverage for the Super shuffle than they would have if they'd just shown up at CeBIT with a big sign that said "LET US BUILD YOUR MP3 PLAYER." Several aspects of this plan strike us as somehow unsavory, but technically no one got hurt (unless you count Apple's lawyers suffering massive disappointment at not getting to file a slam-dunk lawsuit), and from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint, it's hard to argue with results: it seems that now "there are at least two well-known U.S. sold brands that have expressed firm interest" in hiring LUXPRO to manufacture USB-based digital music players with Super shuffle guts firmly ensconced within different-- and presumably far less lawyer-baiting-- plastics. So while crime may not pay, faking a trade dress infringement apparently does.

Are you as disappointed by this turn of (non-)events as Apple's own legal team must be? Well, strictly for the record, we should mention that the reader who reported all these facts to Engadget was Jack Campbell-- yes, that Jack Campbell, a living legend among confirmed addicts of the seedier side of Apple-flavored drama. Given his extensive experience with posting "statements demonstrably contrary to factuality" (why, yes, we do have a shining future in the fast-paced world of online diplomacy-- why do you ask?), if your only chance at long-term happiness and spiritual fulfillment depends on the prospects of a LUXPRO-vs.-Apple courtroom cage match to the death, well, we suppose you could simply dismiss Campbell's testimony as untrustworthy... though we can't imagine why he'd be fabricating such a thing. Still, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Well, that sure didn't take long-- although we have to say, it took a little longer than we expected. We were MIA again late last week when PyMusique made the scene, and if you rely on us as your primary source of Apple-related news (you know, you really shouldn't do that), there's the slimmest of chances that you aren't familiar with what this thing does. In a nutshell, it lets users buy unprotected music from the iTunes Music Store. No, really; apparently some clever code jockeys discovered that the iTMS itself delivers songs sans FairPlay digital rights management code-- it's iTunes that adds in the DRM and ties the song to a given user account. It's just that since the only way to buy iTMS songs was through iTunes, the distinction was purely academic-- until PyMusique came along, that is.

So PyMusique emerged as an alternative front-end to the iTMS, letting iTunes-deprived Linux users shell out 99 cents per song or $9.99 per album just like Mac and Windows users can. If that's all it did, then Apple-- and the record labels-- might not have minded all that much; unfortunately, PyMusique doesn't bother adding FairPlay DRM to the songs it retrieves. And really, why would it? PyMusique was written by a whopping three programmers, including a 17-year-old high school student from Pennsylvania; no one would expect them to do a whole lot of extra work for a smaller payoff.

The upshot is that PyMusique lets Linux users buy completely copyable music from the iTMS, and since Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen (the guy who wound up on the pointy end of Hollywood's legal stick for cracking DVD encryption, and who more recently turned his attention to un-DRMing iTMS-purchased songs) wrote a Windows version whose only conceivable raison d'être is to let Windows users bypass the iTunes DRM and buy unprotected iTMS tunes, well, it's not too hard to figure out why Apple might be just a leetle bit miffed. Heck, even if Apple didn't care, the record labels would obviously pull rank.

So the inevitable has happened; according to CNET, Apple has officially classified third-party access to the iTMS as a "security hole" which was "recently exploited." Personally, that strikes us as something of an extreme characterization, but whatever; in any case, said "hole" has now been closed. As a result, apparently only iTunes 4.7 and higher can now buy music from the iTMS, so anyone using an older version will need to upgrade before they can nickel-and-dime themselves still further into debt. (Apple claims that "only about 15 percent of iTunes users" are in need of an upgrade, so if you're one of them, you can take pride in lagging behind 85 percent of the iTunes-using population. Good thing you're not being graded on this, hmmmm?)

Now, it probably would have taken Apple more than a mere weekend to completely redesign the DRM paradigm of iTMS purchases and move the FairPlay-injecting part of the buying process to the server side of the transaction, so we assume that all Apple's done is enforce some check that attempts to verify that purchases are really originating from iTunes, and not some other application pretending to be iTunes. What that implies is that the iTMS servers are still dishing up DRM-free songs, and it's probably only a matter of time before someone works around the latest authentication scheme and opens the hole again. And Apple closes it again. And someone opens it again. And everyone takes a milk and cookie break. And Apple closes it again. And so on. Isn't copy protection fun?

Looks like someone's spiked the Poland Spring with Happy Juice again. By now you've surely heard that the Wall Street analysts are climbing back on board the Apple bandwagon again, and probably the biggest buzz of the moment is that, as Forbes reports, Morgan Stanley has "drastically raised estimates" on Apple and instituted a practically unthinkable $60 price target. To put that into perspective, you might recall the shocked uproar back in November when Piper Jaffray upped its AAPL target to $100-- and that was before the split, meaning that Morgan Stanley's new estimate is equivalent to $120 by comparison. In other words-- and to put it in strictly technical terms-- Apple is currently generating "mad props" from the suits. Word.

So why the big ol' upgrade? Well, apparently Morgan Stanley recently conducted a survey of Apple customers which reveals that "users of iPods had a 19 percent PC to Macintosh platform conversion rate compared with a street expectation of 10 percent"-- and yup, that sure sounds like a good reason to shower the company with upgrades to us. Seriously, just think about it for a second: one in five Windows users who buy an iPod eventually winds up buying a Mac, too. Morgan Stanley's done the math (that's what they get paid for, we suppose) and figures that the iPod halo effect might lead to Apple raking in a jaw-dropping $16.942 billion in revenue this calendar year, up nearly 22 percent from its previous estimate of $13.914 billion. If that's not enough to get your ticker thumpin', just take a gander at Morgan Stanley's revenue estimate for Apple's calendar 2006: $25.657 billion. Up over 48 percent from its previous $17.268 billion estimate. Someone fetch our heart pills, because we do believe we are gettin' the vapors.

If the sheer enormity of the piles of cash doesn't get your salivary glands working overtime, then consider the implications for Apple's PC market share, which has been hovering in the 2 or 3 percent range for ages now; even the most die-hard Apple fan will admit that's downright pathetic if you get him drunk enough. But with the iPod converting so many Wintel users to Orthodox Macintoshism, Morgan Stanley figures that Apple's global PC market share might jump as high as 5 percent-- this calendar year. And the firm thinks that things might get even rosier than that, with the iPod-owning-Wintel-user conversion rate rising from 19 percent to as high as 25 percent moving forward.

If that turns out to be true, we hereby take back every single negative thing we've ever said about the iPod (yes, even our longstanding objection to its lack of support for the Klingon and Pig Latin languages) and offer to buy it some ice cream. Heck, even a double scoop. It obviously deserves it.

Now, before you all go completely ga-ga over Morgan Stanley's predictions, it's probably worth keeping in mind that a single survey-- particularly one for which we know absolutely zero details about its methodology or scope-- isn't exactly gospel. Not that we're going to argue, of course; we just saw our AAPL stock edge upwards by six bits to $43.70 on a day when the markets overall were down. If that's the start of a gradual run-up to $60 per share, all the better, but hey, we'll even take the short-term boost, you know?

That said, we have to admit it: when it comes to Morgan Stanley's iPod-based Mac share predictions, we're way over on the believers's side of the fence. After all, if the masses are finally smart enough to see that the iPod is a zillion times better than everything else out there, why wouldn't they realize the same thing about the Macintosh? 10 percent share by 2008!