If you sync and configure an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iTunes (versus doing it all via iCloud), the new version may initially be confusing.

Cover Flow, a major feature when it was introduced, is gone.

As in previous years, it's only the generic GSM version (which supports AT&T, Rogers, Telus, and Bell LTE bands) that's available unlocked. Nothing for CDMA carriers like Verizon or Sprint.

It’s these little things in the design that make Fantastical feel professional and refined. This is easily the best-looking Calendar app on the iPhone and it’s a welcome addition to iOS.

There are several new features in iStat Menus 4, but I’d like to mention the ones I personally use. The Network widget has a new per-process section to quickly see which process is consuming bandwidth (think a mini version of Little Snitch); the Time widget still supports different time zones (I use this on a daily basis), but it’s now cleaner and it has support for calendar events to get a quick summary of what you need to do on a specific day.

I think my favorite new design element is what Apple is calling “Expanded View”. In a graphical list of albums or movies or shows, you click one and it opens in a subview right there under the album/movie/show. Instead of going to a new view, you stay where you are. No way to get confused about where you are, more of a sense of direct manipulation. I think this is a brilliant design for everyone, particularly typical users.

Make no mistake: When you first launch iTunes 11, it’s going to feel awfully different from the iTunes you’ve grown accustomed to. That’s because it is awfully different, from many of the user interface choices right down to the brand new icon, which now even more strongly resembles that of the Mac App Store.

While Apple's aesthetic choices may be up for debate (the new icon is particularly ugly, and slightly tweaked fonts may take some getting used to), the new features are most welcome, as is the speedy performance.

Folks who use FastScripts or another utility to script iTunes will be pleased to know that much of its scriptability is unchanged. But some subtle things have changed, including support for minimizing or maximizing the iTunes window.

All you have to do is hold up your iTunes barcode and let your camera do the work. No more laborious typing of barcode-supported gift cards is needed any more.

iTunes 11 sports a massive redesign; Apple calls it an “edge-to-edge design.” Gone is the long-familiar sidebar of old. In its place is a dropdown menu for navigating between sections of the app, along with an omnipresent button at the right to jump into the iTunes Store.

During normal use, your Mac's camera stays off until Should I Sleep detects that the computer is getting ready to sleep. Then the webcam comes on for a few seconds to check to see if you are in front of the computer. If you are, it won't sleep. If you aren't, it will.

Its list-based visual depiction of calendar data can sometimes obscure the fact that certain appointments are directly adjacent each other, or worse, overlap. But at the same time, it offers an ease of event entry that Apple’s own Calendar app can’t rival, and with aesthetics that are far more eye-pleasing, to boot.

A Fusion Drive is not able to transfer a full 1TB of data at SSD speeds, because it does not have a 1TB SSD. As seen in our Speedmark tests, however, smaller (but not small) transfers of data are handled well by this SSD-first strategy of the Fusion Drive. Most jobs are completed with speeds much closer to SSD speeds.

Cupertino-based Apple has struck a deal with developer Peery Arrillaga for a custom-tailored two-building campus that is under construction on the north side of Stevens Creek Boulevard in Santa Clara a short distance from the Cupertino city limits.

Password-reset messages and verification questions come with their own problems and risks. You can reduce your chances of being hacked—or being unable to respond correctly to one of these questions—by following a few simple tips.

Fantastical for iPhone is the same app you know and love, but it’s also different. And yet, I’d argue, with its differences and obvious limitations, Fantastical for iPhone is also more pleasant to use than the Mac version.

500px is a premium photo sharing platform for professional and aspiring photographers for the web and iPad that has now made its debut to the iPhone, and the iPad version got a nice upgrade as well. It's beautiful. 500px for iPhone and iPad lets you scroll through your friends' activity in Flow, discover gorgeous photography in Popular, browse through photographers' profiles, and more.

The ascent solidifies Mr. Cue's role as one of the chief deputies to Mr. Cook, who has surrounded himself with several close advisers without elevating one to a clear number two. Mr. Cue has the loyalty and admiration of many longtime employees, who respect that he was with Apple during the dark days before Mr. Jobs began his turnaround of the company in the late 1990s.

Mr. Cue is also a champion of the Apple way: Entering new areas patiently and slowly and preaching the need to put the customer first. To negotiating partners, he epitomizes the company's penchant for secrecy with a poker face that media companies scramble to decipher.

What follows is a dozen setup tasks that I picked out from my normal techniques, which I thought might be useful to others. Here are some of the things I do to my new systems, to make them shinier and happier and ready to use.

This app simplifies the process of managing promo codes. With it, you can generate trackable codes that ping you back when they're redeemed.

Apple should be careful that in the pursuit of that perfection, it does not remove the things about its products that caused many to fall in love with them in the first place.

But whatever you decide, you need sync in your app. And you need to think about it at the beginning, not at the end.

What I love about Rdio isn’t just the massive music catalog that I have total access to, it’s also that my entire music collection is always available on my iPhone or iPad or Mac. The latter is something which iTunes Match could take care of, but then I’d lose access to the massive catalog of music Rdio gives me access to.

If you need to be prodded to pick up milk on the way home, order that present in time for the big party, or set up that lunch meeting before the end of the day, Siri's there to help.

You may want to separate a Fusion Drive, either to gain a greater level of control or to simply swap out one of the drives. Whatever your reasons are, separating a Fusion Drive is a fairly simple process.

Koku is a solid, basic, personal-finance app that makes it easy to track your personal finances. While it doesn’t yet rise to the level of what Quicken of old could do, it’s on par with Quicken Essentials and a tool worthy of meeting your personal-financial needs.

No matter what tools you use, you’ll have to memorize at least a few passwords. Because those are among your most important, you don’t want to trade security for memorability. Here a few tips that can help you make sure your brain doesn’t betray you.

Today I’ll explain how to do the same with iPhoto. Apple’s consumer-level image library software will help you make a nice holiday card with your own photo(s) and text that grandma and grandpa will love. Plus, working on your Mac is much easier than the iPhone’s or iPad’s smaller screen.

The Apple proposal lays out a structure for modules, which describe libraries and their APIs (interfaces). It will be a fairly major shift if and when this transition is made, as all headers will essentially be thrown out and replaced by modules, except in projects that choose to ignore the whole module thing.

Sure, Mission Control in Mountain Lion lets you view all of your Finder windows at once in a pretty tiled view. But, it doesn't sort them, and with a ton of little windows, finding the one you want is no piece of cake. How nice would it be if the Finder had a "Cascade Windows" feature?

The ad features an actual-size iPad mini on a white background. On its screen is the cover of the same Time issue, just as it would appear on the real device.

Mostly, it’s the ritual, and the spiritual cleansing. I have scrubbed away all of the crumbs and failure. I have a fresh space in which Wonderful Things can be built. Then I put my head down and I get back to work.

For the past two years I’ve been using Spaced to keep up with the most important space news and discoveries; the team behind the app released today a major 3.0 update that adds a completely redesigned UI, iCloud support, and more sections.

Being a virtual personal assistant, of course Siri can take a note! In fact, Siri can not only take a note, but update them as well. If you need something that's more permanent than a reminder, something more like an idea you don't want to forget, or a draft you want to get down while you're driving, Siri and the Notes app are the perfect combination.

Starting with a remarkably easy to use iOS app, Scan is now a complete web service. Scan offers businesses a way to generate and manage codes and get analytics.

The app now includes hooks into the native support of both Twitter and Facebook in Mountain Lion, as well as support for multiple accounts in Twitter. Evernote sharing has been revamped completely, so that's easier to use.

The latest update to the software adds inbound-connection management, too. Little Snitch has graduated from being a sort of outbound-only firewall with notifications to being a full-fledged firewall product with a friendly interface that informs you about any network-related activities.

The company announced early Tuesday that the new iMac will become available on November 30. You’ll be able to order both the 21.5-inch and the 27-inch versions of the all-in-one computer as of Friday at Apple’s website, but only the smaller incarnation will be available at Apple’s retail stores and authorized resellers. The 27-inch version of the new iMac won’t start shipping until December.

In this latest installment of IFTTT Recipes, I'll show you how to use Siri to turn on your Christmas lights -- and amaze the little ones at the same time.

Savan Kotecha spent about $80,000 to modernize his 2,400-square-foot West Hollywood, Calif., home. Mr. Kotecha, a 34-year-old songwriter and vocal producer on Simon Cowell's "The X Factor," is an admitted "Apple freak" who uses an iPad app made by home-automation company Crestron.

GM says today that it has found a way to link Siri to the new infotainment systems in its two smallest cars, Chevrolet Spark and Sonic. Drivers will be able to continue their chats with voice-activated Siri behind the wheel in order to perform the same tasks that they usually do on their smartphone, from checking sports scores to phoning friends. Only now, they will be able perform those functions while keeping their eyes on the road at all times.

If you haven’t examined your approach to making and using passwords recently, now is a good time to rethink your assumptions. Here are a few important facts about passwords you may not have realized—and what they mean for you.

Nook for iOS now fully supports screen magnification and, more important, VoiceOver. This effectively makes the app more accessible to users who have low vision or are altogether blind.

One way to access or activate some display- and window-related features in OS X is to use screen hot corners, which you can set up to activate the desired feature by moving your mouse to the respective corner. For example, if you wish to manually activate the screensaver, then you can bind this to a hot corner and then move your mouse there to always activate the screensaver.

It’s like every magazine is reinventing HTML and programming their own browser for it. Of course that’s going to end badly!

Earlier plans for a massive amount of underground parking have been scaled back, according to the drawings filed Nov. 14. The new plans show parking space only directly under the building. The old plans showed the parking excavation extending beyond the building's footprint.

There’s a big difference between the two in price: Mountain Lion’s dictation feature is free with the OS, while Dragon Dictate will set you back $200. But that isn’t the only difference.

Happily, putting together a holiday newsletter is a snap using the apps included with your Mac. You can use both Pages and iPhoto to create simple, elegant newsletters to include with your mailings.

Less than elegant. Certainly not "it just works."

I think that nothing will replace ubiquitous credit and debit card payment systems until a service comes along that is a dramatically simpler solution, or offers compelling additional functionality that encourages people to leave their cards (and wallets!) at home.

Perhaps the most useful feature is the ‘Twitter Selector” option, which allows you to specify a slightly different version of your update specifically for Twitter.

There are many products for cleaning electronic screens — liquid sprays, microfiber cloths and such. But Unplugged Goods has a product to keep you from smudging your screens in the first place.

The two-part retrospective of Denmark’s lively hippie culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s was rejected by Apple’s iBookstore sales platform last month because – with photographs of naked men and women – it violated the company’s policy guidelines, which stipulate no sexually explicit photos.

The Hippie book controversy follows a series of similar attempts by Apple to censor – or deny market access – to artistic material it deems offensive. Among the casualties were Naomi Wolf’s new book, Vagina: A New Biography, which was given the edited title, V*****. Two mainstream German publications, the magazine Stern and the mass circulation tabloid Bild, have also run afoul of Apple’s content police, again because of nudity.

Apple kicked off its Black Friday sale today with discounts on iPads, iPods, and Macs.

Apple suggested the delay is the result of the company bringing its product design ethos to bear on the project.

"Turkey" has a Thanksgiving theme that shows off Photo Stream and how you can use it to share your holiday photos.

I have found that WordPress, although approaching the challenge from a different angle, is to a large extent equal to the task, and offers a number of advantages to boot.

This year, there are a few ways to avoid waiting in a long line. It just takes a little planning ahead.

Apple says that Supplemental Update 2.0 “addresses an issue with Keychain that can affect 2012 Mac systems.

Nokia HERE is a free, universal app that's powered by Nokia's NAVTEQ mapping data. It includes a garden variety of views like map view, live traffic view, public transport line view and satellite view. It also supports offline maps, so you can still travel when you lose your data connection.

That's when it clicked. When I realised I had - without really thinking - done all the things I need an iPad to do for a whole week without being forced back to a full-size iPad, I saw that the iPad mini is just that: an iPad. No need to over-think the distinction, no real need to develop theories about it: the iPad mini is an iPad in the same way that the 13" and 15" MacBook Pro are both Macs. They'll both do the same 95% of the job: get the one that suits you best.

I’m a strong believer that familiarity and consistency between OS X and iOS will increase, but they won’t take away the unique traits that make these platforms suitable for different contexts, for different users.

Apple declined to comment on Tawkon or Fandor, but in general has maintained that tight control is essential for ensuring the quality of customers’ experiences. The company screens out potentially buggy or completely ridiculous apps, for example. And Apple says the vast majority of apps — more than 95 percent — are accepted on the first submission.

While US patent D670,713 isn't exactly a narrow patent, there are some real limitations on what it covers and how it could be used against the competition.

My friend and co-worker Tom has a thesis about Apple’s biggest problem: Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.

They didn’t patent all page-turns — just page-turns that look (and, presumably, work) like iBooks’.

I’m sure we’re going to continue to hear the calls for a retina MacBook Air. I hear you. But you should really check out this new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s pretty damn close to what you’re asking for. It’s nearly the perfect MacBook.

Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession’s shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category. These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers.

Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real, and lasting, the rise in app employment might be.

This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.

In an email to users on Friday, Apple reminded Messages beta program participants that the preview period will end on Friday, Dec. 14, noting that the service will then only be available on OS X Mountain Lion.

I’ve never observed anything else that has had the impact on teacher personal learning like the introduction of the iPad.

For anyone who makes a living making complex screencasts on a Mac, there’s no doubt that this new version’s a must-buy.

In this week’s column, I look at iTunes Store authorization issues, how to get albums to stay together, a question about working with artwork, and how to split your iTunes library.

News flash: skeuomorphism is not dead. What’s dead are cheesy, antiquated graphics — like the stitched leather look in Contacts and Calendar. These were aberrations in a world that had been built upon good taste.

Skeuomorphism is a good thing. It’s part of what made Apple what it is today — interface elements presented as real-world references to things we instantly understand. Things like documents, folders, trash cans, calculator, etc.

Apple Maps' turn-by-turn features aren't too bad, considering that it's free, but the inaccuracies in the maps means it still needs to rate a fail compared to something like the TomTom or Navigon app. If you've been using a paid app you're very unlikely to abandon it for Apple Maps. Near enough just isn't good enough when it comes to satellite navigation and there's a long road ahead before you can have complete faith in Apple Maps.

Most notably, the screen now includes a lefthand sidebar, with a Shortcuts section that gives users quick access to a custom assortment of notes, notebooks, tags, and Saved Searches. The sidebar also includes a list of recent notes, and views of your notebooks and tags.

The Room for iPad is a fascinating game. You’re in a room with a well-locked safe, and your goal is to get that safe open. The game makes the story more detailed than that, but The Room’s storyline is its least interesting aspect. The fun comes from the hours of puzzles and challenges required to break open the safe, coupled with the game’s delightfully creepy ambience.

But Google Voice Search is getting close to fulfilling Apple’s broken promise.

Our Macs can store these passwords and, in many cases, automatically fill them in when needed. But there’s more to know about passwords and the Mac's ability to store them than the simple fact that they exist. Here's a quick guide to what you can—and can’t—do with OS X’s passwords.

Apple will pay shareholders its second dividend in 17 years tomorrow, distributing roughly $2.5 billion in $2.65 per share across the company's 935 million outstanding shares.

But what is equally obvious to me after using it is not only do the benefits outweigh the costs for most people’s primary tasks, like browsing the web or reading email, but that it opens up entirely new contexts for where the iPad can be used, and thus opens up new uses.

Early iTunes Match adopters are starting to receive notices that their iTunes Match subscriptions are being renewed, while others are getting emails from Apple stating their subscription couldn't renew due to problems with billing information. Confused? Confounded? Caught off-guard? Here's what you need to know!

Today, Apple has confirmed that they will be opening their first store in South American in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In an email sent to Brazilian press, Apple said that they’re looking forward to opening the new store in Brazil, where they “already have long standing customers,” and they “hope to win many more each day.”

1Password 4 brings a simplified design language and experience to iOS, yet also manages to ramp up the power and convenience.

Ravensburger is a German gaming company that specializes in jigsaw puzzles, but has also expanded into other areas such as children’s books and games. The company owns the trademark to a board game called Memory and has demanded Apple stop offering apps that have the word ‘memory’ in their title or as a keyword associated with an app.

It may seem ludicrous such a common word can be trademarked, but apparently this is a valid claim as Apple is now serving notices to app developers. The choice an infringing app developer has is to either rename their app or remove it from the App Store.

The third-generation iPad, labeled obsolete by some customers annoyed with the quick release of its successor, is selling for more than $400 in some resale markets. Buyback websites have jumped at the chance to turn a healthy profit on the tablet.

With its smaller size, the iPad mini is a more intimate, more personal device. It feels good in my hands. It fits.

The abuse of push notifications is spreading across the App Store. As a result, users are starting to reflexively reject app requests to send push notifications.

PRX was asked by This American Life for help in figuring out a spike in bandwidth bills in October, and found a similar problem in its own logs. It isolated the behavior to ensure its own streaming apps weren’t at fault. Its analysis shows that apps that rely on iOS frameworks to handle networked audio streaming in iOS 6.0 make multiple overlapping requests for audio that substantially increase the total number of bytes downloaded. The blog entry noted that a 30 MB podcast consumed 100 MB to downloaded, an exact ratio (30 MB taking 100 MB) that TidBITS and its readers have seen as well.

For a tech startup to get to 100 million users is a remarkable feat, one that took Facebook more than four years. Online-storage firm Dropbox on Tuesday announced that it has achieved that milestone in nearly the same time.

After two years in development, Boinx is back with FotoMagico 4, an impressive overhaul that opens up a wide range of creative possibilities for amateur and pro shutterbugs alike -- and it’s cheaper than ever, at least for new customers. Boinx doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel with this version, retaining the already well laid out (and very Apple-inspired) user interface, while managing to introduce an entirely new way of working.

Customers on Tuesday began receiving word from Apple's online store that their orders for the new iPad mini with LTE connectivity have begun shipping.

Stephen Elop, chief executive of Nokia, said in an interview that in order to ensure that its mapping platform stays competitive, it needs lots of users. The more people who look up directions or search for locations on its maps, the smarter the system gets. And Nokia can still build exclusive location features into its Lumia phones, he said.

Nearly three months after delivering a more secure, modernized Flash plugin to Chrome users on Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, Google has extended those safeguards to Mac OS X. The update was actually packed into the version of Chrome that saw release last week (with Do Not Track functionality), but the company is only today highlighting the added security measures. Flash, frequently targeted as a backdoor for malware, is now fully sandboxed within the browser with isolation Google says is as strong as Chrome's own native sandboxing. In theory, that means should you come across a malicious website or script, the harmful code would be relegated to a single browser window and thus be prevented from accessing to your computer or personal files.

By giving you extensive control over the menu bar, Bartender makes a key element of the OS X interface way more useful.

Earlier this year, Apple told some employees about a new initiative called "Blue Sky" that allows a small group of staffers to spend a few weeks on a pet engineering project, according to three people told about the program.

It is a more limited version of similar initiatives for hatching new ideas that have long existed in Silicon Valley. The most well-known of those is Google's "20% time," which allows employees to spend up to a fifth of their time on projects outside their normal responsibilities.

Restoring data from Time Machine is just as easy as backing things up in the first place.

Macworld Lab received a Fusion Drive with a build-to-order Mac mini. We’ve had a chance to experiment with it, and now we can answer many of these burning questions.

Apple didn’t make an arbitrary decision to withhold Retina on the Mini to save money, upsell more buyers to the iPad 4, or “force” the first generation of iPad Mini owners to upgrade next year. They chose not to ship a Retina iPad Mini because it would be significantly worse than the previous iPads in very important factors.

Siri stands as a monumental opportunity both for Apple as a transactional money machine and for its users as a new paradigm of discovery and task completion more approachable than any we’ve seen to date. In the end, Siri is Apple’s game to lose.

Apple has pulled AppleCare protection plans off their retail store shelves in Italy as well as advising authorized resellers not to offer them any further. Due to warranty protection set in place by the EU, Apple had recently faced the possibility of a temporary ban on their products in Italy. As of now, the only way for Italian customers to purchase AppleCare protection plans is online.

Glassboard’s private group messaging system has proved a useful, and surprisingly easy, way to keep important communication channels open for my family when we’ve needed it most. If you’re looking for a way to keep in touch with a smartphone-using group, it’s absolutely worth a try.

The new Smart Filters and Find window save time and effort. The Quick Entry app is useful for glancing at today’s weather and agenda, as well as for adding new events and tasks. And since events and tasks go hand in hand for most people, BusyCal’s integration of the two is far superior to Apple’s separation into discrete Calendar and Reminders apps.

It's often said that Apple doesn't get gaming and doesn't get social, so maybe social gaming like Game Center was predestined for birthing pain. But it's also likely exacerbated by Apple not having a single shipping product that depends on Game Center being great.

One of my favorite RSS readers is appropriately called Reeder. As with all RSS apps, you subscribe to a website’s RSS subscription feed, and the reader grabs the latest headlines and summaries and brings them right to your Mac’s screen.

“Reading is a simple pleasure that we often take for granted until vision loss makes it difficult,” said Daniel Roth, M.D., an associate clinical professor at Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine who led the study. “Our findings show that at a relatively low cost, digital tablets can improve the lives of people with vision loss and help them reconnect with the larger world.”

‘Now you know the real reason for Browett’s firing’, a friend said, half-seriously. ‘How can you spend North of $15M on such a strategically placed, symbolic store, complete with Italian stone hand-picked by Jobs himself…and give no consideration to the acoustics? It’s bad for customers, it’s bad for the staff, it’s bad for business, and it’s bad for the brand. Apple appears to be more concerned with style than with substance!’

The word that worried me the most in the press release was in the first sentence. The word was “collaboration”. Close your eyes and imagine a meeting with Steve Jobs. Imagine how it proceeds and how decisions are made. Does the word collaboration ever enter your mind?

Apple and HTC have reached a global settlement to their long-running patent dispute. The settlement includes a 10-year cross-licensing agreement.

If I had $70 to spend on this problem, instead of a hand-crank or solar charger with a tiny capacity, I’d rather have the Tekkeon AA box and 40 lithium AAs, which could power my iPhone for about a month of frequent use.

The iPad Mini is a smaller iPad . . . but by no means is it a lesser iPad. That’s what makes it such an exciting product.

A polyvalent text-editing powerhouse. Part text editor, part to-do-list maker, part outliner, part Pomodoro-method task manager, FoldingText is like and unlike every text editor you’ve used.

The Export function in Aperture 3 is a versatile tool for moving copies of your pictures out of the application. It’s also one of the more misunderstood functions of Apple’s flagship professional photo-management application. If you’ve felt a certain lack of control in this area, I’ll get you on track right now.

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic search capabilities, Desti is said to be able to understand your intentions in planning a trip. From its demo, if you happen to be looking for a trip to Monterey Bay with the family, the app will conduct a search and pull up results that suit your needs. The company says the app has deep knowledge about specific geographical regions that help to provide it with much deeper information and context than what you might expect from other travel sites.

In the new version of Paper released last week, you mix colors with your fingers, like it's paint--only somehow more beautiful. This one magical feature burned a year of development time, resurrected the work of two dead German scientists, and got Apple's attention.

Finally jumping headfirst into iOS with a redesigned experience, the updated Tumblr app is now live on the App Store. Whereas the previous version relied in part on simplified web views to replicate the Tumblr feel, the new experience is 100 percent native to iOS.

If you have an older Mac system that seems to be on the slowish side, a few upgrades can help you get the most out of it.

The new release introduces a revamped interface that keeps the clean aesthetic the app is known for, but simplifies it further, introducing the ability to add unlimited content per page and swiping to reveal a new category sidebar.

Too much whimsy can be irritating and Apple's products in the past few years were skewed towards skeuomorphism. A touch of rebalancing away from such contrivances is probably in order. But a bit will enliven drab software. You would hope, therefore, that Mr Ive does not throw the simulated baby out with the digitally enhanced bathwater.

Under fire from its customers in the higher education market, Apple has proposed creating a new industry standard that would fix problems with its Bonjour zero configuration networking technology that is causing scalability and security problems on campus networks.

This is unquestionably Apple’s most powerful iPad to date, and it handles pretty much anything you can throw at it with aplomb. If the new iPad mini is a MacBook Air, as my colleague Dan Frakes alleges, then the fourth-generation iPad is the big iron of a MacBook Pro.

Star Wars fans will love the quirky mix of characters, and Rovio deserves a lot of credit for thinking of ways to include Star Wars style effects into the Angry Birds game mechanics. It’s a new way to play Angry Birds, and a great way to while away a few hours.

It’s better to have a few fantastic things designed for you than to have many untrustworthy things poorly designed to please everyone. The result–being able to blindly trust the things you own–is intensely liberating.

"With Clear for Mac, we wanted to spearhead a new design direction for Mac UI that focuses on simplicity," Realmac's Rob Jarman told me. The result is a perfect companion to Clear for iPhone, but one that lacks what made the iPhone version so special: a beautiful interface that was both very intuitive and very convenient to use with your fingers.

My biggest objection is that there’s no ideal way to fold the cover behind the iPad mini when you actually want to use the tablet.

Also disappointing is the fact that the iPad mini Smart Cover just feels floppier and flimsier than its big brother.

Many declared that they would not abandon Snow Leopard, the OS that launched in August 2009, because it was the last from Apple that let users run PowerPC applications, even though the operating system itself runs only on Intel-based Macs.

Apple has sent email to iCloud users who have existing me.com and mac.com email addresses, with the news that those of us with the old-style addresses can now receive email to the same user name at icloud.com as well — apart from the domain name, there is no difference in how mail will be treated or received.

Still, there’s growing pressure on Apple to keep delivering radically new and exciting products. And that might be leading the company to reconsider its frugal R&D investments. In a recent SEC filing detailing its increasing R&D expenditures, Apple wrote that “focused investments in R&D are critical to its future growth and competitive position in the marketplace and are directly related to timely development of new and enhanced products.”

Old and missing drivers are an issue, but we'll hook you up with what you need.

You have to wonder if Apple and Intel are in some kind of negotiation phase right now.

So Apple, give us control over our purchases, and let us eradicate those apps from our accounts. Just because we pick up a newspaper on the way to work doesn’t mean we have to keep it for the rest of our lives, and apps shouldn’t be any different. Downloading or purchasing an app is an extremely lightweight action, which isn’t bad, but such simple actions should be easily reversed as well.

Don’t confuse the “mini” in “iPad mini” with “lite”—with the exception of a Retina display, this slimmed down iPad gives you the full iPad experience, including access to over 275,000 iPad-optimized apps, in a device that’s about half the overall size and weight of the standard iPad. Retina-display purists will (justifiably) balk at the 1024-by-768-pixel screen, but I suspect that most people will be wowed enough by the iPad mini’s other features, performance, design, and build quality to accept the screen for what it is—very good, but not Retina.

Apple is one of many major corporations that keeps its taxes low by stashing cash offshore. In reality, it's not as simple as just opening a bank account in the Caribbean and sending checks there every month. In order to get its rates down, Apple has actually set up subsidiaries and subsidiaries of subsidiaries in countries with low corporate taxes, and it shuttles funds between them in order to minimize its liabilities. The specific strategy that Apple uses is known as the "Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich."

With so many organisations deploying so many Macs, we can no longer rely on the psychological crutch that these units are seeing service simply because of the ego or desire of a handful of top brass. My personal experience says that business Mac usage is being driven by employees looking for comfortable and familiar environments; the results of BYOD policies at IBM, Intel, Google and other large organisations would seem to agree. It would seem that when everyday people are given the choice of computer platform, we do not all choose the same thing. Let's review what it takes to make the jump.

So even ignoring Apple’s track record of reporting sales by family, it seems there’s no upside to splitting the sales figures. Given the lack of a good interpretation for any split, as a shareholder I’m happy they’re reporting a lump sum figure.

It's unclear why Mac users are holding on to Snow Leopard, but one factor may be that it is the newest Apple OS able to run applications written for the PowerPC processor, the Apple/IBM/Motorola-designed CPU used by Macs before Apple announced a switch to Intel in 2005.

In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.

In other words, if you’re debating between a large iPad and the mini version, you’re probably going to buy the mini version. And for most users, I think that will be the right choice.

An informal drop test performed by a third-party warranty firm found that despite having an extremely thin bezel, Apple's new iPad mini outperformed both Google's Nexus 7 and the third-generation iPad.

Fan Xingchen, an employee at a sales company and Apple fan, said he was looking forward to the opening. He already has four Apple products and plans to buy a new 15-inch Mac.

"For small accessories I will go to a reseller in the neighborhood, but if I buy a big thing like an iPhone or a computer, I will be more likely to go to an Apple store, I think they're more reliable and that the product life will be longer," he said.

Apple’s “scale it down” approach means that the iPad Mini gets to run every standard iPad app. And while one can argue that not every user needs all of the iPad apps available on the App Store, it’s impossible to deny that the best-in-class tablet apps are all owned by iPad. Result: there’s little question that this mini-iPad won’t be a lesser iPad.

Real conclusions (the kind that I can defend with the full might and authority of researched-backed arrogance) will have to wait until next week. I certainly like what I’ve seen so far.

It's true that the overall UI is shrunken down a bit on the iPad mini when you compare it against a 9.7-inch iPad. As I wrote above, apps that work on the iPad 2 will look and behave pretty much the same way on the iPad mini, but they'll be a bit smaller. And I really mean "a bit." During my initial testing, I didn't find that small UI elements were significantly harder to hit the first time, whether I was clicking on links or tapping on buttons.

Can’t say it’s a huge loss, but it looks like Apple is finally going to starting removing apps whose sole purpose is to offer emoji, the emoticon characters popular with the younger text messaging crowd. Some developers are reporting that their emoticon-enabling apps are now being kicked out of the App Store, with Apple citing native support for emoji as the reason for the app’s removal.

The new Mac mini continues to build on the solid foundation laid out by the 2011 model. If you prefer a Mac desktop computer to a laptop, and/or you don’t want to be confined to the glossy 21.5 or 27-inch displays that come with the iMac, the Mac mini is a capable system for most tasks.

Chances are you’ve encountered Game Center’s green felt background on one of your many Apple devices. Maybe it popped up when you were trying to start a game of Letterpress, perhaps you got a notification letting you know it was your turn, or maybe you were just wondering about that multicolored icon Apple dropped on your home screen. If it had your confused, don’t worry: Let us walk you through how to get the most out of Apple’s online gaming service.

Mac shops with significant FireWire investment may not need a total Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 makeover, but staying put with current hard drives and devices will come at a price.

Among the bugs squashed in iOS 6.0.1 is one where horizontal lines may show up across the software keyboard, another where the camera flash wouldn’t fire, a problem where the iPhone couldn’t always use cellular networks, an issue where Passcode details could be retrieved from the lock screen, and a flaw with Exchange meetings.

Scrolling affords a completely empty kind control. The user is doing more, she’s controlling more, but she’s not actually achieving more.

The UK court of appeal has reprimanded Apple over the wording of the statement on its website acknowledging that Samsung did not infringe the iPad tablet's registered design, and ordered it to put an altered statement on its homepage – rather than tucked away in a linked page – until 14 December.

iMovie ’11 offers many options for styling title text—more than you probably realized. But what if you want even more control over how text appears? Or maybe you want a custom graphic or logo to appear in the corner of your video. With an image editor and a small amount of trickery, you can easily do so.

It's not Intel SRT, it's not file-based, and it works on OS X right now.