Apple is reportedly having a growing number of iPhones that experience partial failures of the touch-input system — often starting from the top and sometimes moving down the screen vertically in “rows” roughly equal to the height of the application icons on the “Home screen.” Many users contact Apple and get replacements before the problem worsens beyond the uppermost ‘row,’ but the problem does appear to be progressive in most cases if left uncorrected. More on this as reports come in.

As our contributors and writing staff have had the chance to use Apple’s new Keyboards in both Wired and Wireless forms, it’s remarkable how much they match the prototypes we’ve been talking about for months….but also striking how different they are from anything that has come from Apple or anyone else in the past. We’ll be talking much more about our experiences with these keyboards soon — suffice to say that if you want a guide to the look and feel of Macs and iDevices to come in the next year or so, look no further.

As a matter of fact, several of our sources have been repeatedly pointing out since the very first leaked pictures of the new Apple Keyboards appeared that prototypes of a next-generation Mac Mini (due in about 3-5 months, a possible Macworld SF announcement in January), the Macbook Thin/Macbook Nano that we’ve been talking about since before the first Macbooks even shipped, and even the next generation Mac Pro & Xserve….will all include industrial design changes inspired by similar ideas to what we have seen in the iPhone and the new Keyboards.

The Macbook Thin, a product line that has been simmering at Infinite Loop since the beginning of the Intel Era and the End-of-Life (EOL)’ing of the mid-range Powerbook G4 12-Inch….has been waiting for several advancements to arrive. Now that these are all in place, the final prototypes for the new mid-range Apple ultraportable laptop are not so different from Intel’s recent reference designs for such machines based around its 2.2 and 2.4GHz Santa Rosa “Core 2 Duo Mobile” chipsets.