A curated selection of the day’s most newsworthy tech stories from all over the Web.
- Seems TechCrunch’s report late last week regarding early Yahoo layoffs may have been premature and inaccurate. (See below.) According to All Things D, the layoffs at the Internet company actually start today, with many, but not necessarily all, of the 650 to 700 cuts coming from Yahoo’s product division. (AllThingsD)
- Microsoft may announce several tablet PCs from brands like Samsung and Dell at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next month, some of which may be running an early version of Windows 8. (New York Times)
- According to MacDailyNews, Verizon could be readying a 4G version of the iPhone 4 for launch after Christmas. (Fortune)
- Gawker Media may have been the one to make headlines, but it looks like McDonald’s fell victim to hackers, too. An unidentified group walked away with an unspecified number of email addresses and phone numbers for customers who registered online for store coupons. (The Next Web)
- Former Google employee Brian Kennish plans to focus all his energies on Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome and Rockmelt browser extension that disables multiple third party data tracking, or prevents outside parties like Digg, Facebook, Google and Twitter, to get information about users while they browse the web. (TechCrunch)
- In November, the average retail price of sold PC’s hovered around $615, up from 6% last year, leading some execs to believe the industry is witnessing a price reversal. (Wall Street Journal)
- Though Amazon has never been one to disclose concrete sales figures for its Kindle ereader, it was willing to admit it’s sold “millions” of Kindles so far this quarter. (Boy Genius Report)
- According to a Forrester survey, the average U.S. consumer spends just as much time — 13 hours, to be exact — online as watching TV. (Wall Street Journal)
- Google announced YouTube Trends, a site combining “algorithmically-determined” video lists with posts intended to track the latest viral videos gaining popularity on YouTube. (Business Insider)
- Rip-off of the week: the limited Luxury Edition of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which becomes available tomorrow through the end of January for $1,000. The only difference between this version and the standard edition will be a leather case and Bluetooth headset. (Yes, really.) (TGDaily)
- Goldman Sachs’s Bill Shope predicts of the 54.7 million tablets sold next year, 37.2 million of them will be iPads, making Apple “one of the largest vendors in the global personal computing market.” (AllThingsD)
Update: The TechCrunch item we linked to in yesterday’s roundup regarding Yahoo layoffs last week was later corrected. Senior software developer Zach Graves said he wasn’t talking about layoffs but employees who had decided to willingly leave. We regret the error.
