After years of planning what promises to be Silicon Valley's most iconic landmark, Apple this week enters the final stretch in its plan to open its new saucer-shaped headquarters in Cupertino. On Tuesday afternoon, the company and city officials will hold a public discussion that could help determine the building's fate, allowing political leaders and the public to weigh in on the completed environmental impact study and learn how Apple intends to address concerns that have been raised. The excitement is growing.

T-Mobile grew to 13.2% of smartphone sales in the U.S. market in the 3 month period ending August 2013, marking its highest share of sales over the past year, and realized a growth of 1.1% points, reversing an on-going trend of year-on-year decline. The sales growth comes as a result of strong iOS sales and strategic discounts, based upon analysis by the company.

Every so often, a company changes our lives, not just with its products, but also with its ethos. This is why, following Coca-Cola's 13-year run at the top of Best Global Brands, Interbrand has a new #1—Apple. Few brands have enabled so many people to do so much so easily, which is why Apple has legions of adoring fans, as evidenced by the record-breaking launch of the iPhone 5c/5s. For revolutionizing the way we work, play, and communicate—and for mastering the ability to surprise and delight—Apple has set a high bar for aesthetics, simplicity, and ease of use that all other tech brands are now expected to match, and that Apple itself is expected to continually exceed.

A report published by Hankyung in Korea today states that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will handle the majority of the manufacturing for Apple's next-generation A8 processors, and the remainder will go to Samsung Electronics.

Apple's first wearable computer project surfaced in 2008 in the form of a video headset that may one day surface either as an iDevice accessory or one that's related to gaming. That particular invention has since been granted a patent. Yet it's Apple's most recent wearable computer invention that seems to have ignited something big at Apple. Once the buzz surrounding a possible future Apple iWatch-like computer hit fever pitch levels we began to hear news about a new special projects team forming at Apple. In early July we learned that Apple hired Ex-Yves Saint Laurent CEO Paul Deneve to work on "Special Projects." Then the news of Bob Mansfield, Senior VP of Technologies was shifting to work on "Special Projects." Yesterday, Apple reportedly hired one of Nike's top Fuel Band Designers Ben Shaffer to work on "Special Projects."

The Hong Kong Patent Office has granted Apple 59 new design patents covering everything from the iPhone through to all-things related to Apple's "Maps" App and much, much more. The designs related to the iPhone were published yesterday while the remainder were published late last week. Interestingly the newly granted design patents were buried on pages 5 to 7 of the Hong Kong database instead of their customary first page placement. Whether this was a clerical error or one requested by Apple is unknown at this time. Our report provides you with a full overview of the 59 design patents along with a few enlarged Graphics for clarity and your visual enjoyment.

On Wednesday we reported that IDC was forecasting a huge leap in iOS 7 adoption in China for 2014. The holdup to the iPhone being released in China is a technical one at the moment as the carriers await new 4G licensing. A new report out of China presents us with China Mobile's prepared advertising for a launch supposedly to occur sometime in November if the licensing remains on schedule.

It's being reported today in Japan that the Tokyo District Court has ordered Apple to pay US$3.35 million in damages to Japanese inventor Norihiko Saito for patent infringement involving iPod music player. Update 7:30 PM PST

Early last week we noted in a report that there were "rumours on some mainland Chinese technology websites about the possibility of a new gold-color iPad." At the time we stated "Is that just 'gold hysteria' running rampant in China or could there be such a twist coming our way in the next few weeks?" Today, a Chinese website called DoNews is running two photos of the iPad mini in gold. If they're fakes, then they're damn good ones – but it's not really a stretch to think that Apple would extend their color scheme and Touch ID to the iPad or iPad mini.

To date, our most comprehensive report on Liquidmetal was posted back in April 2013. Today, Patently Apple is the first to discover four new yet painfully detailed patents in Europe on this subject matter. These extremely difficult reads were more about the science behind liquidmetal than products and yet at the heart of each we were able to find a few interesting trickles of new thinking of how Apple could translate this material into elements related to future products. In fact, one of the four patents delves into liquid metal as it relates to plastics and more particularly, to plastic injection molding. It makes you wonder if there's a connection between Apple's new iPhone 5c and Apple's work with liquidmetal.

In June we reported that TSMC (Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and its Integrated Circuit Design service partner Global UniChip had secured a three-year agreement with Apple to supply foundry services for the next A-series chips built using 20nm, 16nm and 10nm process nodes. The foundry was to complete installing a batch of new 20nm fab equipment, which is capable of processing 50,000 wafers, in the first quarter of 2014. Today a report claims that TSMC is aggressively ahead of schedule.

In the first two days after iOS 7 was released, the adoption rate quickly jumped to 32% which was a historic record for Apple. After a week, the adoption rate of iOS 7 has leapt to 51.8% which has already beaten Google's adoption rate for Android-Jelly Bean which was at 45% of the Android ecosystem in 14 months, according to Chitika Research.