Mint CEO Aaron Patzer isn’t itching to sell his online budgeting service, but a company like Microsoft would do well to buy it anyway.

No one’s said much about it, but there it was, plain as day, in Apple’s (AAPL) earnings call this week: Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said the ‘A’ word.

Acquisitions.

When an analyst asked what Apple would do with more than $18 billion in cash it’s sitting on, Oppenheimer downplayed the possibility of a major stock buyback, and hinted that Apple could go shopping instead. “Our preference,” he said, “continues to be to maintain a strong balance sheet in order to preserve our flexibility to make strategic investments and/or acquisitions.”

Which is a fine segue to my piece in the latest issue of Fortune, which seeks to tackle the issue of what, exactly, Apple and others should do with their growing stacks of Benjamins. Among my recommendations: Apple should buy a green startup, Microsoft (MSFT) should buy Mint, and Google (GOOG) should buy TiVo (TIVO).

Though Apple normally doesn’t buy many companies, I suggest 2008 might be a good time for Jobs & Co. to throw some money around. (Same goes for Microsoft and Google, which do a lot more spending than Apple.)

Flash-based laptops? Suped-up iPhones? The wait is over for Apple’s biggest announcements of the year.

The crowd at Macworld 2008 settles in for the Steve Jobs keynote. Photo: Jon Fortt

SAN FRANCISCO — The keynote has begun. There’s a Mac vs. PC commercial showing. PC is talking about what a bad year 2007 was, with all of Apple’s announcements including the iPhone. PC says 2008, though, will be a great year. “What are you going to do?” Mac asks. “I’m just going to copy everything you did in 2007.”

Steve Jobs walks onstage from the left.

Sony’s XEL-1 flat TV with OLED technology drew big crowds at the Consumer Electronics Show. Image: Jon Fortt

LAS VEGAS - After chatting with Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow, I had to see what the hype was about. So I headed over to Sony’s booth here at the Consumer Electronics Show to check out a $2,500 flat-panel TV with a screen a little bigger than paperback book.

Yes, at 11 inches, it’s that small. So what makes the XEL-1 worth as much as an HDTV 10 times its size?

At next month’s Macworld show, will the trendsetter say goodbye to hard drives?

Apple’s MacBook Pro could get a storage upgrade soon. Image: Apple

What do you get when you cross an iPod with a Mac?

A super-slim laptop that uses chip-based flash memory in place of a spinning hard drive, of course. If the rumors are right, Apple (AAPL) will unveil one at the annual Macworld confab next month.

Before you begin salivating from gadget lust however, be forewarned. The rumors should be taken with a grain of salt (or a whole tub of it if you have one handy) — and not just because Apple prognosticators have predicted for years that an ultra-light dream machine is right around the corner.

Inside HP’s plan to get more bang for its research buck

Prith Banerjee, former dean of the engineering school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, brings new ideas to his role as director of HP Labs. Image: HP

It’s a tale nearly as old as Silicon Valley itself. Nearly 30 years ago, a young Steve Jobs visited the scientists at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and spied the first computer that had a mouse and desktop icons. Jobs soon commercialized similar ideas at Apple’s (AAPL), but Xerox couldn’t seem to take the brilliant concepts from its own labs and turn them into marketable products.

Today Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the valley’s largest tech company, wrestles with a similar problem. Though HP’s advanced research group once invented wonders such as the scientific calculator, the thermal inkjet printer and commercial LED lighting, these days executives feel HP Labs and its $150 million annual budget could do more to boost the company’s bottom line.

The scrappy chipmaker has plenty of life left – but mistakes have cost it dearly.

AMD’s manufacturing facility in Dresden isn’t yet producing enough quad-core chips to boost the bottom line. Photo: Sven Doering/AMD

If you’d like to beat up on Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz, now would appear to be a good time. Ruiz has won praise for helping the chipmaker mature into a worthy challenger to industry heavyweight Intel, but as he prepares for a Thursday meeting with Wall Street analysts, AMD has the look of a well-used punching bag.

Its stock this year has dropped by half, and in recent weeks it has dipped below $10 per share for the first time since 2003. That price marks a disheartening throwback to the days when PC makers didn’t take AMD’s processors seriously and its market share was weaker at about 15 percent. There’s good reason for the share price collapse: though AMD landed a few good shots in recent years, Intel (INTC) has bounced back with a popular, competitively priced product lineup that’s grabbing back some market share and erasing its rival’s profits.

Intel’s new Penryn chip. Image: Intel

Intel has launched a new generation of chips that it hopes will boost its lead over rival Advanced Micro Devices heading into 2008.

The line of chips, code-named Penryn, uses a new manufacturing method that allows Intel (INTC) to make the chips both smaller and more efficient. Penryn chips should help companies like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) to design more energy-efficient servers, more powerful of desktops and more portable laptops.

In the near term, Penryn’s value to Intel could be more about reputation than the bottom line. Earlier in the decade, competitor AMD (AMD) took advantage of the chip giant’s missteps and offered products that many in the industry judged to be technologically superior to Intel’s. But now Intel is back with a vengeance, and has AMD on the ropes. And because the Penryn chips are based on an advanced 45-nanometer manufacturing process, they give the company valuable bragging rights.

Servers like this one, which put information onto the Internet, let off a lot of heat – and it takes energy to cool them. Photo: HP

The Internet is hot. Not just hot as in popularity. Hot as in heat.

It’s so hot, in fact, that data centers – those expensive warehouses full of computers that serve up information – are racking up huge power bills. According to Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) calculations, a large data center with 70,000 square feet of space might guzzle $10.4 million worth of power in a year. Data centers require so much energy that over a three-year period, the computers inside could easily cost a company as much to plug in and cool as they did to purchase in the first place.

To deal with the power problem, and make some money in the process, HP weeks ago began selling a homegrown technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling. Today, the company is releasing numbers it hopes will convince customers that the technology works.

Refresh this page for updates as the event progresses.

Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini is giving the opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the chip giant’s biggest event of the year. Intel controls 75 percent of the global semiconductor market, but is in a pitched battle with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for the future of chips that sit at the heart of PCs, phones, servers and more.

Companies such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) use these chips across their product lines, and they, along with the rest of the information technology industry, will be looking to Otellini for a roadmap to the future.