Apple

This week,"The Amazing Race"brings us hay, oil, apples, cheese and crackers. Plus a little bit of heartbreak. I'm fortified with lots of homemade peppermint cookies, though, so I can get through this. Remember Bavaria? Land of Beards and Inquisitive Cows? That was so seven days ago. The remaining teams are sent to Baku, Azerbaijan. I know, you're all, “I'm so tired of everyone always going to Azerbaijan, it's like the Palm Springs of the Eurasian continent.” I'll still give you a geography refresher, though.

Apple made headlines again last week, but this time they weren't entirely about the new iPad. The tech behemoth announced that it would start paying a quarterly dividend worth $2.65 per share beginning in July. That amounts to nearly $10 billion to be paid out in the first year alone. "Apple is the leader here," says Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst with Standard & Poor's, who adds that the company will put pressure on other technology firms to start paying dividends.

Shocking bulletin from the Big Apple: New York is officially agog at the Jets signing of Tim Tebow. "Linsanity" is so yesterday. Now it's all about "Timsanity. " The New York media is reacting to the Jets' controversial signing in its usual under-stated way. The New York Daily News has a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty on its cover. The New York Post ran a front-page headline that blared: "GOD HIM!" And it's all Tim Tebow, all the time on talk radio and the TV sports show.

Apple today announced what many were expecting, given its huge war chest of around $100 billion in cash: future stock dividends and a stock repurchasing program. The company released the news in a conference call early Monday. It's amassed a huge pile of cash in recent years thanks to the runaway successes of its iPhone and iPad, a smartphone and a tablet, respectively, that are dominant in their categories. Apple said it plans a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share sometime in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012, which begins in July.

About 8:30 Friday morning, Brian Dorr emerged, with a large smile and his arms raised, from the Apple Store at The Mall in Columbia, as blue-shirted employees cheered and slapped him high-fives. He and his wife, Donna, got what they came for: the third-generation iPad. While the rest of the mall's stores were closed and window displays were dark, a line formed around the second-floor Apple Store as shoppers gathered to purchase Apple's latest coveted gadget. Apple started selling its newest tablet Friday, betting that the sharper screen and faster chip will extend its lead over Google and Amazon.com in the growing market.

What does Apple's latest iPad mean for users? For me, the answer is simple: potentially far less eye strain. The first two iPads had a nice display, but the third generation really packs in extra pixels and is expected to be a whole new experience. Four times more pixels than the iPad 2 , according to Apple. I did a lot on my first and second iPads (which I sold in order to upgrade), from gaming to writing to web browsing. But I didn't spend a lot of time doing focused reading on it. I think I maybe read one or two Kindle and iBooks on the devices.

If you don't support gay marriage, you probably don't want to get caught with a cone of Ben & Jerry's new flavor. Apple-y Ever After, available in the U.K., is the activist ice cream maker's attempt to advocate for gay marriage as it comes under consideration there this month. "Because ," the company says, "everyone is equal and deserves to live Apple-y Ever After!" Since Maryland beat the Brits to the punch, legalizing gay marriage earlier this month, there are no doubt a number of folks around here who'd like a scoop, or perhaps a double.

Apple is expected to unveil the latest version of its category-busting tablet computer, the iPad, today at a product launch in California, starting at 1 p.m. EST. in San Francisco . Various reports say Apple will not call it the iPad 3, but rather: the iPad HD, presumably to signify the improved screen resolution. The iPad has been a smash success for Apple, paving the way for a new class of "PC" products that are in some ways better than laptops (at least per this CNET article .)

Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, is on stage in San Francisco talking about iPad stuff. I'm following Engadget and Gdgt blogs for live blogging, and I'll post key details here as they come. * Cook announces a new Apple TV, with 1080 (HD) capability. New user interface. Photo Stream support, meaning you take a pic with your iPhone and it automatically appears on your TV (through Apple TV). Also, you can generate Genius playlists off your movie choices in iTunes. * iPad: Cook says, via Gdgt: “We've sold almost 15.5 million iPads last quarter alone.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s, there was a gold standard brand-name in consumer electronics: Sony. If you had disposable income and were interested in entertaining yourself, you were looking at Sony products first, and then working your way down. In the early part of this century, that mantle was captured by Steve Jobs' reincarnated Apple. Through its dominance in high-end mobile devices and consolidation of major functions, Apple pulled the dedicated portable gaming system out of the mainstream consumer's hand and replaced it with a sleek, pricey, all-in-one device.