While I often ignore the senseless rumors that come from the tomfoolery of tech "analysts", this latest one claiming that Apple plans to discontinue the 17" MacBook Pro comes from Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst with KGI Securities who has gotten some things right about Apple products in the past. Kuo believes that this discontinuation will come as a result of Apple's convergence of the Apple's Air and Pro notebook lineups. In Q1 of 2012, Apple sold roughly 3.1 million notebooks. Out of that figure, nearly half of those were of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Kuo has a bleak estimation of the 17-inch Pro sales figure, however, stating that only 50,000 were sold in that quarter.
Tying in with rumors surfacing last month, the Worldwide Developer Conference will indeed begin on the week beginning June 11th, it has been confirmed by Apple itself. The conference, held during the middle of each year, is one of the fruit company's main events, and in the past, has launched some of Apple's most successful products to date. This year, as you'd expect, the main focal point will be the upcoming Mountain Lion OS for Mac, but workshops will focus on both iOS and OS X Mountain Lion, offering attendees guidance on how to enhance apps in terms of performance, quality, functionality and design.
If you were one of the ones individuals who were a little concerned about the security of your Mac when we brought you the news a week or so ago about the existence of a Trojan that infected machines by using a Java vulnerability, then you best brace yourself as a new variant of the infection has been discovered.
The wraps have finally been taken off Google's mythical Google Drive online storage and collaboration service, with the news first being leaked via Google's own French blog. Now though, the app is available to download for anyone with the right hardware, and if the video Google has put out is anything to go by, it's going to be pretty awesome.
All those iPhone 4S and Siri fans who can't put the intelligent assistant down due to their love of her dulcet tones will be more than happy to find out that you can give your Mac Siri’s voice, yes, make your Mac sound just like Siri! When Apple launched OS X Lion; they introduced a large array of new features, with one of the main ones being the inclusion of Nuance powered speech technology.
While Quake 4 has been around since 2005, recently creators Bethesda - of Skyrim fame - decided to re-release the title for those who may have missed out the first time around. Although the purpose of a re-release is often to add HD visuals or update and improve the game, in this case, there weren't any - much to the bemusement of Quake fans. Still, those left somewhat disappointed may be pleased to learn that the OS X version has just hit the Mac App Store, costing $19.99.
Ecamm's PadSync aims to make transferring files to and from an iPad as easy as it should have been all along. Getting files onto, and off of, the iPad is still more difficult than it really should be. Apple's method of handling the whole thing via iTunes just isn't as clean as we would like, and having to sync an entire iPad just to get a Word document onto the device is just plain crazy in anyone's book.
Just as the Flashback Trojan for Mac was being dealt with by OS X users across the world, a new version of a backdoor Trojan for Apple's operating system capitalizes on an exploit in Microsoft Word in order to spread.
While Macs have been notorious for being impervious to viruses - at least in terms of perception, while they were vulnerable, far more viruses were produced for Windows than OS X - their reputation for impeccable security is certainly being questioned now. Flashback, malware built to grab private information such as passwords entered in by users in applications, has evolved over time into a very dangerous piece of malicious software. In its beginnings, it required user interaction - through a dodgy looking Adobe Flash Installer - to lodge itself into one's Mac.
Apple has today pushed out an update for OS X which it hopes will close hole that allowed the Flashback Trojan to infect over half a million Macs. The update, named simply Java for OS X 2012-003, comes after over 600,000 Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan at its peak, leaving third party developers to put together various apps for diagnosing and then cleaning infected systems.
