AllThingsD » Mac OS X

iOS 7, Breaking the S4 and Teaching Kids to Code — 10 Things You Need to See on AllThingsD This Week

Eric Johnson — Sat, 04 May 2013 18:00:10 +0000

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

Sources say that Apple is pulling engineers from the next version of OS X and assigning them to its mobile OS in order to get a preview ready in time for next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
By 2017, more than half of companies will require their employees to supply their own devices on the job, according to a new Gartner report.
A California court has ruled in Facebook’s favor versus “typosquatters” who benefited from registering domain names with misspellings like “gacebook” and “dacebook.”
Speaking of Facebook, it’s growing — but that growth rate has seen a slow decline over the past year.
As it tries to convince consumers that the iPhone and Android aren’t the only options, Microsoft released a hard-edged, humorous ad for Windows Phone.
Buying a laptop is all about timing; if you can, you might want to wait.
“This is just like another language, just a different set of life skills than if you learned French or Spanish.” That’s Krishna Vedati, CEO of Tynker, a platform aimed at teaching children to code.
Consumer electronics warranty provider SquareTrade says Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 is more breakable than both the S3 and the iPhone 5.
In AllThingsD Must-Reads, Bizo CEO Russell Glass writes, “There is a revolution brewing in the enterprise and it’s starting right at the desk of the chief marketing officer.”
To show off its ability to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms, IBM released the smallest movie ever made: An animated short called “A Boy And His Atom.”

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

Tim Cook, Pulling in the Reins

Voices — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 06:59:51 +0000

There’s a long-standing pattern of separating watershed products important to the company’s future. The Mac and Apple teams. Mac OS X and Classic. The iPod division. iOS and Mac OS X. Suddenly, Tim Cook has pulled the reins in. Federighi owns software. Ive owns design. Cue owns services. Period.

– Matt Drance, via Apple Outsider

Apple Talks Lower Margins Now, Ginormous Sales Later

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:58:51 +0000

AllThingsD.com

Apple just reported another one of those uncomfortable quarters where consumers were holding back and waiting for new stuff. And it showed.

Profits on a per share basis at $8.67 were well short of the $8.75 analysts had expected, even though they were up 24 percent year on year. Sales, though ahead of the consensus, were a little light, too, at $35.97 billion.

Obviously, there was a lot of pent-up demand for new iPads, which Apple announced last week, new Macs, and even iPhones in the quarter. That means that having come in a little light this quarter, expectations for Apple to make it up in the first quarter — including the holiday period — will be higher.

The earnings conference call is just about to start. We’ll see what Apple executives have to say about all this.

Update: So the call is over. There were a handful of interesting comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. One came by way of explanation for the lower-than-expected profits and gross margins. All those new products that Apple released this week? They’re a little more expensive to make than the prior generation. And so gross margins are a little bit lower than they otherwise would have been.

Another interesting admission concerned the iPad mini. Its gross margin, Oppenheimer said, is a little “lower than the corporate average.”

But just wait until the first quarter of Apple’s fiscal year 2013, now in progress. That’s the holiday season quarter, and all those products are going to start selling. Oppenheimer said Apple expects to report sales of $52 billion in a single quarter. For perspective: That’s nearly $10 billion more than the revenue Apple reported for the entire year in 2009.

Here’s my rough transcript of the earnings conference call.

2:02 pm: And the call is getting under way. CFO Peter Oppenheimer is speaking.

Oppenheimer: 4.9 million Macs is 1 percent growth, and a record for a September quarter, and is better than the 8 percent market contraction that IDC predicted.

Oppenheimer is now running through the product announcements made earlier this week.

Mac Channel inventory is three to four weeks, below target of four to five weeks.

Now he’s talking about iPod, which is still the top selling MP3 player in the world. Apple sold 5.3 million iPods during the quarter.

iTunes brought in $2.1 billion in revenue. A revamped iTunes is coming. No mention yet of the radio service that was reported earlier today and totally killed Pandora shares.

Oppenheimer: Now speaking about iPhone 5. Demand has been phenomenal, he says. Demand outstrips supply. We ended the quarter with 9.1 million iPhones in channel inventory and that’s below target of four to six weeks channel inventory.

Oppenheimer: Talking about business adoption of iPhones. Canon has given them to its field sales team.

2:08 pm: Oppenheimer: Amtrak uses an in-house app for ticketing; reporters around the world are using iPhones to capture video.

And now he’s talking about iPad. They were ahead of our expectations. Strong sales year over year.

Oppenheimer: Recognized revenue from iPad and accessories was $7.5 billion vs. $6.9 billion. Ended quarter with 3.4 million iPads in inventory, just higher than the target of three to four weeks.

Oppenheimer: Volkswagen has developed in-house iPad apps across the company. Also a Chinese insurance company, the name of which I will not attempt to spell.

Oppenheimer: We will not stop until Maps — the troubled iPhone app — lives up to our standards.

Oppenheimer: Apple finished the quarter with 390 stores.

Oppenheimer: Operating expenses were $3.5 billion. Cash: $121.3 billion up from $117.2 billion last quarter. Increase was net of $2.5 billion worth of dividends paid, which amounts to $2.65 a share. About 82 percent of cash was offshore. Also, in August, Apple said it would buy back some shares.

Oppenheimer: Here’s the outlook. Revenue at $52 billion vs. $43.6 billion. Gross margin 36 percent. Opex $4.05 billion. EPS $11.75.

2:17 pm: Oppenheimer is wrapping up which means its almost time for the Q&A.

Katy Huberty: Asks about the possibility of EPS declines year on year. What’s driving the gross margins down?

Oppenheimer: The change year over year is being driven by the extra week last year. That along with a stronger U.S. dollar and the change in gross margin.

Oppenheimer: As you pointed out, this is the most prolific product period in Apple’s history. New products represent 80 percent of expected revenue. We’ve never before introduced so many new products with new form factors at once, and each one has higher costs. (I’m paraphrasing here.)

Oppenheimer: We’re heading into the quarter with the strongest iPhone line-up ever. Also, the iPad mini is priced aggressively. Its gross margin is significantly below the corporate average. (I guess that answers the critics who said the price wasn’t low enough!)

2:22 pm: Oppenheimer: We will work hard to get down the cost curves and improve our efficiencies. To be in a position to anticipate demand for $50 billion or more in revenue reflects our strength.

CEO Tim Cook is speaking: We’re unwilling to cut corners. This is the reason our customers choose to buy our products. We’re managing the company for the long run and will make great long-term decisions.

Question from Bill Schope of Goldman Sachs: Asking about the supply ramp for the iPhone in the holiday quarter.

Cook: Demand for iPhone is extremely robust. We are in a significant state of backlog right now. Our output has improved significantly. I’m very pleased with the progress. This is the largest volume ramp in Apple’s history. Difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance.

Question from Toni Sacconaghi from Sanford Bernstein. He’s asking again about the ramp of iPhone. Do you expect all 100+ countries this quarter? And will the supply contraints have material impact on cost of goods sold? Will COGS decline?

Cook: In regard to the first question, we still continue to expect to roll out to 100 countries. It is our largest ever, there will be some larger countries in December. With each new product we see learning curves in terms of production. The difference is the number of new products that we have moving at once. This is the most prolific period in our history in terms of new product introductions. We do see all of these costs associated. But I don’t see costs accelerating on a per-unit basis.

2:28 pm: Cook we continue to be confident that the tablet market will surpass the PC market. It is already extremely compelling for many customers to choose a tablet, in particular an iPad, over a PC. There is an enormous opportunity for Apple there. We do think the iPad, mini and iPad 2 will all be an extremely attractive offering in lieu of a PC. We will focus on the future of the iPad.

Question from Shannon Cross: Talk a little about China. Clearly with the revenue guidance it remains strong, but with the economy it’s mixed.

Cook: Revenue was $5.7 billion. IPad was up 45 percent in Greater China. Iphone was up 38, all in all a fantastic quarter in China. That brings us to a full year $23.8 billion in China, which is really phenomenal when you think about it. That’s up $10 billion year on year, and amounts to about 15 percent for all of Apple. We are continuing to invest in our retail stores there. We continue to expand distribution with channel partners there. We see it as an extremely exciting market.

2:32 pm: Cross again: With the launch of Microsoft Surface today, talk about the competitive landscape.

Cook: I haven’t played with a Surface yet. What we’re reading about it is that it’s a fairly compromised and confusing product. One of the toughest things you do with a product is make hard trade-offs and decide really what it should be. I suppose you could design a car that flies and floats, but I don’t think it would do all of those things very well. I think people, when they look at the iPad versus competitors, they will conclude they really want an iPad and they will continue to do that.

2:33 pm: Question from Ben Reitzes at Barclays: Is there more of an education focus with the mini? How do we think about the cannibalization of the form factor vs. the old product?

Cook: The way we look at this is that we provide a fantastic iPod touch, an incredible 4th generation iPad, and mini. The customer will decide what they would like and will buy them. We’ve learned over the years not to worry about the cannibalization of our own product. There’s still 300 million PCs being bought each year and a great many of those will be better off with an iPad or a Mac. Instead of being focused on cannibalizing ourselves, its really an enormous incremental opportunity for us.

Reitzes is asking about AppleTV. We haven’t heard about your hobby lately?

Cook: We sold 1.4 million AppleTVs. That’s more than 5 million during the fiscal year. Almost double the previous year. The business continues to do very well, but if you look at the revenue of the business versus the others, it’s quite small. Still a hobby, but a beloved hobby. We’ll continue to pull the string and see where it takes us.

2:37 pm: Gene Munster asking about the deceleration of iPad sales.

Cook: June to September quarter was 17 million to 14 million. June contained a 1.2 million increase in channel inventory. The sell-through looks different from reported sell-in numbers. The 14 million exceeded what we expected to do in iPad. We expected it to decline. Based on prior results, we would see a seasonal reduction in the September quarter. K-12 schools buy heaviy in the June quarter, versus the higher ed market. That is exaggerated when we announce a new product in March and have enormous demand in June and then a natural phase down. In addition to all that, it’s clear they held back on purchases due to new product rumors. These intensified in September.

2:39 pm: Cook: On a year-over-year basis, because of the year-ago quarter having a channel inventory build, the sell-through grew 44 pecent, so the underlying sell-through was extremely strong. We feel great about how iPad has done.

Munster: Given what we’re seeing in margins, as some of these products get more expensive, would you be willing to pass those costs onto customers?

Cook: It’s a hypothetical question. We think we’ve made great choices here.

Question from Mark Moskowitz: He’s asking about iPhone and iPad comparisons in sequential quarters.

Oppenheimer: We expect large sequential increases.

Moskowitz: Asking about iPhone 5 rollout. Will you have supply contraints in all markets or will there be certain markets where you intend to hit equilibrium?

Cook: What we did initially, we planned the first 30-40 countries, and rolled that across September in two different dates. We planned with an eye toward supply and what we think the demand will be. We do plan these in advance. It is not a precise science. We have to plan them with several weeks of notice. Occasionally it can be different than what we think.

Question from Steve Milunovish of UBS: Asking about pricing philosophy of the iPad mini.

Oppenheimer: When we set out to build the iPad mini, we didn’t set out to build a small cheap tablet. We set out to build a smaller device with the full iPad experience.

2:45 pm: Cook: We try to create a product that people will love for months and years and continue to use it in a robust way. You can really see that by looking at usage statistics. More than 90 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads. Apple will not make a product that people rarely use once they get it home. (Paraphrasing.)

2:46 pm: Milunovich is asking about the enterprise opportunity.

Cook: We now have almost all of the Fortune 500 who are testing or deploying iPads. We’ve also pushed fairly aggressively in the Global 500 and those are above 80 percent on iPhone and iPad. We’re doing fairly well there. There’s clearly much more to do but I’m felling pretty good about it.

2:47 pm: Question about the component environment (didn’t catch the name of who’s asking).

Cook: In terms of iPad and iPhone, I don’t see a component shortage gating us for the quarter in the numbers we have given you in the guidance. I think we have solved some challenges there and feel good about our position.

In terms of general shortage, the iMac will be constrained in a significant way. There will be a short amount of time during the quarter to build them. We will have a significant shortage there. (Hint: If you want an iMac, order it right away!)

2:50 pm: ISI, Brian Marshall asks about iPhone unit growth vs. revenue growth. He’s seeing a variance between that pattern and the iPad. Is it less accessories or a dollar spend?

Oppenheimer: The iPhone ASP were relatively flat year on year and up slightly sequentially. Ipad ASPs were down year on year in a low-double-digit way. This was reflective of price reduction on iPad 2 and stronger dollar and a little change in the mix. That drove the ASP change year on year. Sequentially, ASP was flat.

Marshall is asking about U.S. iPhone activations being faster than international.

Cook: We launched iPhone 5 during the quarter. I would have expected that versus the rest of the world.

2:52 pm: Question from Keith Bachman, BMO: Will the iPhone 5 launch in China in the December quarter?

Cook: Yes, it will.

Bachman: Will you end the quarter with a backlog?

Cook: I am not projecting whether supply and demand will be in balance. I’m confident we’ll be able to supply quite a few during the quarter. Demand is very robust.

Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank asking about the iPad. Specifically asking Cook for his view for emerging model of subsidies on tablets. Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. How is that impacting the iPad business?

Cook: We’ve seen low-cost challengers before. Ipad beats every product at any price. We’re confident our focus on making the best product is what will win at the end of the day and we will stay true to that.

Whitmore: Asking about suppliers. Is that creating an added layer of complexity and to what extent is that contributing to higher cost structure?

Cook: I would not say there has been a significant change in supplier partners. I wouldn’t describe any change as significant. There hasn’t been one that would drive more cost.

Whitmore: I was asking about LCD screens and Samsung.

Cook: No change in cost, and we continue to have a commercial relationship with Samsung (despite the epic lawsuits).

2:57 pm: Question from someone whose name I didn’t get: Why is the time for iPad mini now right?

Cook: The comment that I think you’re referencing are comments that Steve Jobs had made about 7-inch tablets. We would not make a 7-inch tablet. We don’t think they’re good products. We would never make one. One of the reasons is size. Not sure if you saw our keynote, but the difference in just the real estate size in 7.9 vs. 7 is 35 percent, and when you look at usable area is much great than that, more like 57 percent. IPad mini has the same number of pixels as the iPad 2 does. You have all 275,000 apps that are iPad ready. IPad mini is a fantastic product, it is not a compromised product. It’s in a whole different league.

Sorry, I missed that guy’s second question. Oppenheimer is now speaking about gross margins and the effect on them by the sheer number of products that Apple just announced.

Oppenheimer: We are also going to work to get down the cost curves as we have done in the past. No change in what we try and work on and we’ll report to you in January how we did.

And that’s it. Thanks for being here.

Apple Comes Up Short in Q4 as Profits Miss Street Expectations

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:38:09 +0000

Apple just reported its quarterly earnings of $8.67 per share on sales of $35.97 billion.

The earnings were lower than the $8.75 consensus though sales beat the $35.8 billion in sales that analysts had expected. Both numbers were as usual, substantially higher than Apple’s guidance of $7.65 per share and sales of $34 billion.

Apple’s third fiscal quarter is often a quieter one, bolstered a bit by the back-to-school season where it has traditionally promoted sales of notebooks. Consumers also have lately been holding back on purchases of new iPhones iPads and Macs anticipating correctly that new products were on the way to ensure strong holiday-season sales.

Apple shares, after closing the regular session down by more than 1 percent to at $609.5 rose by $3.51 in after hours trading or less than 1 percent to $613.28 before its shares were halted.

Here’s some data points:

iPad sales were sequentially down by 17 percent to 14 million units in the quarter, clearly a sign that consumers were waiting for the announcement that Apple made last week of a new iPad and the iPad mini.

Sales of iPhones on a unit basis were about even sequentially. Apple sold 26.9 million of those in the quarter versus 26 million in the third quarter.

Mac sales were solid. Apple sold nearly 5 million in the quarter, of which nearly 4 million were notebooks. Mac sales in the Asia-Pacific region, including China amounted to $7.5 billion which is interesting for the fact that that region drew nearly even with Europe, which reported $8 billion worth of Mac sales.

Here’s another: Apple’s pile of cash continued to grow: Its combined hoard of cash, short, and long-term investments reached $121.25 billion. It paid a dividend of $2.65 a share.

Update: Trading has just resumed and Apple shares are falling. As I type they’re trading at about $598, down about $11 or more than 1 percent.

Here’s Apple’s announcement.

Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results
26.9 Million iPhones Sold; Record Fourth Quarter Revenue and Profit
Board Declares Quarterly Dividend of $2.65 per Common Share

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 fourth quarter ended September 29, 2012. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $36.0 billion and quarterly net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $28.3 billion and net profit of $6.6 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.0 percent compared to 40.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
The Company sold 26.9 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 58 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 14.0 million iPads during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.9 million Macs during the quarter, a 1 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 5.3 million iPods, a 19 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.
Apple’s Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $2.65 per share of the Company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on November 15, 2012, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on November 12, 2012.
“We’re very proud to end a fantastic fiscal year with record September quarter results,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re entering this holiday season with the best iPhone, iPad, Mac and iPod products ever, and we remain very confident in our new product pipeline.”
“We’re pleased to have generated over $41 billion in net income and over $50 billion in operating cash flow in fiscal 2012,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the first fiscal quarter of 2013, we expect revenue of about $52 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $11.75.”

Apple Says Mountain Lion Downloads Top Three Million

Ina Fried — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:32:41 +0000

Apple said on Monday that more than three million copies of its latest operating system were downloaded in just the first four days.

That’s the fastest start to any of the eight versions of Mac OS X. AllThingsD reported on Friday that Mountain Lion was off to a roaring start due to its low price and the fact it was available as a digital download and update.

“Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever,” Apple Senior VP Philip Schiller said in a statement.

Mountain Lion includes a number of features brought over from iOS, including notifications, dictation, AirPlay mirroring and sharing features.

Apple's Mountain Lion Off to a Roaring Start

Ina Fried — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:02:21 +0000

Thanks to its easy download and low price, Apple’s Mountain Lion appears on pace to be one of the most quickly adopted operating systems in history.

After just its first 48 hours on the market, Apple’s new Mountain Lion already accounts for more than 3 percent of Mac Web traffic, according to numbers provided to AllThingsD by Web tracking firm Chitika.

“Moreover, based on Apple’s June 2012 announcement that there are currently 66 million Mac users in the wild, we can infer that 2.11 million Mac users downloaded OS X Mountain Lion in the past 48 hours,” Chitika said. “Using this figure, if we assume that 90 percent of these users paid to upgrade, OS X Mountain Lion generated $38 million in revenue for Apple in the past 48 hours.”

Just how many of those users are paid upgrades is tough to say, though. In addition to non-paid use, Apple also allows Mac users to upgrade all their personal Macs for a single $19.99 fee.

What is clear, though, is the low price tag combined with electronic delivery appear to be a winning combination for getting users to quickly move to the new operating system. Chitika notes that it took Apple three months to reach 14 percent market share with Lion, its last update. The Web tracking company said it would expect Apple to hit that goal much faster.

Apple released Mountain Lion, also known as Mac OS 10.8, on Wednesday as a digital download from its Mac App Store.

The update includes a number of features brought over from the iPhone and iPad, including support for iMessage, a notification center, Twitter integration and dictation.

Apple Unleashes Its New Mountain Lion System

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 12:38:22 +0000

The line between personal computers and mobile devices has been blurring for years. With the release Wednesday of Apple’s newest operating system, called Mountain Lion, shifting between these devices has become even more natural.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve tested the new operating system, formally known as OS X version 10.8, for the past week. It introduces new functions and it mirrors several helpful features first found in the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, such as seamless sharing with third-party networks, iCloud integration and dictation. But I ran into some trouble with Twitter notifications and Calendar.

Apple’s Mountain Lion, which comes just a year after the launch of its previous operating system called Lion, incorporates elements from mobile, but still maintains a separation between the PC OS and the mobile OS. Later this year Microsoft will introduce Windows 8, its first operating system that completely merges the company’s tablet operating system with Windows.

Mountain Lion’s Facebook Share sheets let people instantly share content to Facebook.

For $20, one copy of Mountain Lion can be installed and used on all of the computers that you and your family own. Starting Wednesday, it’s available exclusively as a digital download from Apple’s Mac App Store. Most Macs bought in mid-2007 or later that run OS X version 10.6.8 or later will be able to upgrade.

There are over 200 new features in Mountain Lion, so I focused on the ones that made the biggest impression on me. That list includes Messaging, which elegantly blends iMessage with other messaging on the PC; Notification Center, which cleans up notifications from various applications by organizing them in a single panel that slides out from the screen’s right side using a two-finger trackpad swipe; Dictation, which lets people speak anywhere they can type; and integration with Facebook and Twitter, though Facebook won’t work until this fall via a software update.

Messaging elegantly blends iMessage with other messaging on the PC.

I got completely addicted to Mountain Lion’s Share sheets, which pop up whenever you’d hope to be able to share something. This includes Web pages from Apple’s Safari Web browser, and items from Apple’s Notes program or photos that you want to send to friends. Share sheets use whimsical animations to bring a paper clip, photo and text together on a little piece of virtual paper that gets whooshed off into the ether. Sharing works through a variety of methods, so you can be sure to reach anyone.

ICloud, Apple’s cloud service, is one of the keys to Mountain Lion’s magic, and it works in the background to send the same data to applications on all of your enabled iOS devices. This lets you relax and pay less attention to what you stored where, because it doesn’t really matter. If you don’t own other Apple devices or don’t use iCloud, Mountain Lion won’t make quite as much of an impact on you.

It’s also worth noting that Apple’s mobile operating system, called iOS, won’t be updated until this fall, meaning a PC, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch should by then work more cohesively with Mountain Lion. I got an early look at Mountain Lion’s integration with Facebook, which is still in its “beta,” or test phase, and is currently only available to developers.

Two of the coolest Mountain Lion features will only work with certain new Macs: Power Nap and AirPlay Mirroring. Power Nap, which updates the PC once an hour as the computer sleeps, only works on the MacBook Pro with Retina Display or MacBook Airs made after mid-2011. AirPlay Mirroring lets people display whatever is on their Mac’s screen on an HDTV with a $99 Apple TV device plugged into it. AirPlay Mirroring only works with the second-generation or newer Apple TV and the iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro made at least as recently as 2011.

The Notification Center cleans up notifications from various applications by organizing them in a single panel that slides out from the screen’s right side using a two-finger trackpad swipe.

I tested both of these features on a MacBook Pro with Retina Display and they worked as advertised. My email, software updates and calendar alerts appeared almost immediately when I woke my PC, thanks to Power Nap. But it doesn’t update a computer that’s asleep for less than an hour, which is often the case for me since I take short, 30-minute breaks while I write. I used AirPlay Mirroring by clicking one button on my MacBook Pro with Retina Display and watching a YouTube video about Sally Ride on my 42-inch HDTV. The image quality looked terrific.

Mountain Lion does a nice job of integrating third-party services, like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Vimeo. If you sign into a network once, you’re signed in everywhere else you might use that network on the PC, which is a plus. Facebook and Twitter integrate with PC Contacts to do smart things like using friends’ Facebook profile photos as Contact photos, and updating these images automatically as friends change them. You can also grab profile photos from Facebook for contacts who aren’t your Facebook friends.

But some features in Mountain Lion need a little polishing.

The Notification Center wasn’t as helpful as I hoped. Twitter and Facebook status update boxes at the top of the Notification Center panel were too limited. When I pasted long Web URLs into tweets, they weren’t automatically shortened, which forced me to use Twitter.com or TweetDeck. Facebook status updates only let you type plain text rather than tagging friends or uploading images in posts.

Notification Center promises to alert you of @reply or direct messages that you receive from Twitter. But it failed to tell me about dozens of @replies that I received; the only ones I did see were from people I follow on Twitter. After some troubleshooting, Apple conceded that Notification Center is currently only capable of showing @reply or direct message notifications from people you follow. They promised to fix this issue in a future update to Mountain Lion.

Facebook notifications from the Notification Center weren’t yet ready for me to test.

The Notification Center kept my last five unread emails, as well as upcoming calendar appointments, and alerts and banners appeared in the top right of my computer screen to tell me about certain things so I wouldn’t miss them. If this drives you nuts, a simple on/off switch at the top of the Notification Center will stop them for a day; settings in System Preferences will permanently turn them off.

I also had trouble with Calendar, which repeatedly told me it couldn’t sign into my Google Calendar, though it displayed events from my Google Calendar. I did a lot of troubleshooting with Apple, but couldn’t solve the problem. Apple said this was an issue they haven’t seen before and that they’re planning to fix it.

Dictation works wherever you can type in Mountain Lion, and users can get it working using one of two methods: Tap the Function key quickly then again to hold it down and speak, then let it go when finished, or simply select the microphone icon (where visible) when you start and stop dictating. This works like dictation on the iPhone or iPad, which shouldn’t be confused with the iPhone’s digital assistant, Siri. You’ll still need to use keyboard shortcuts or the mouse, rather than your voice, to perform commands like “Send” or “Post.”

Apple’s iCloud replicates Reminders and Notes on your PC and other devices. This was a big help to me as I tested Mountain Lion because I wrote down a lot of my impressions in Notes, and these synced to my iPad and iPhone.

I successfully tested other features including setting up VIPs in Mail, storing documents from Pages in iCloud and testing Tab View in the new version of Safari.

For people who already use iPhones, iPads or iPod touches, many of the new features in Mountain Lion will feel like second nature. I can’t completely rely on Notification Center just yet, but this operating system’s focus on smart sharing and overall integration with social networks makes it a pleasure to use.

Write to Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Former Apple VP Bertrand Serlet Joins Board of Parallels

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 05:59:29 +0000

Former Apple Senior VP Bertrand Serlet, the longtime head of Apple’s Mac OS software team, and who left the company last year, is joining the board of directors at Parallels, that company said.

Serlet, who is often called the father of Mac OS X, worked at Apple for 14 years. At Parallels he will be a non-executive director. In a statement, Parallels CEO Birger Steen called him “the rare combination of a software visionary and master of execution.”

Serlet came to Apple by way of NeXT, the software company Apple so famously acquired at the end of 1996, in a move that brought Steve Jobs and several other key executives back to engineer what has been called the greatest corporate turnaround in history. Serlet worked on NeXTStep, which was an early foundation of OS X, as well as on OpenStep and WebObjects. He also spent four years as a researcher at Xerox PARC. He holds a doctorate in computer science from France’s University of Orsay.

Serlet’s departure from Apple was initially seen as a surprise, but was later determined to have been part of a planned transition, during which Serlet handed off his duties to Craig Federighi.

Parallels is best-known for the virtualization software that allows Mac users to run Windows and other operating systems on their machines. It’s a privately held company that has been around since 1999, and counts Insight Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. But it also sells the Plesk suite of server management tools.

Seagate to Acquire Consumer Hard Drive Maker LaCie

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 23 May 2012 18:00:30 +0000

Hard drive giant Seagate said today that it will acquire LaCie, the French company behind the popular line of consumer hard drives and other storage devices.

Seagate has offered $186 million, or about 4.05 euros per share, for 64.5 percent of the shares of LaCie controlled by Philippe Spruch, the company’s chief executive. The offer amounts to a premium of almost 30 percent.

Anecdotally, I can also say that LaCie’s drives are probably the most popular among people who own Apple Macs. I see its orange-encased ruggedized external drives everywhere Macs are used, and I own about a half-dozen of them myself. From a consumer retail perspective, Seagate has generally struggled to penetrate the Mac-owning market. And as we all know, the size of the Mac market is growing faster than the rest of the PC-owning world.

There’s also LaCie’s considerable retail and distribution footprint to consider. Under terms of the deal, Spruch would join Seagate.

Seagate is approaching the deal from a position of renewed strength. It weathered the flooding in Thailand, which hammered the hard drive industry’s supply chain and caused a shortage last year, better than rival Western Digital.

Mountain Lion and Windows 8's Common Aim: Make Desktop More Like Mobile

Ina Fried — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:16:24 +0000

Although they are doing it in different ways, Apple and Microsoft are aiming for a similar goal with their next desktop operating systems: To make the computer more like the phone.

Apple on Thursday announced its plans for Mountain Lion, Mac OS X 10.8. Due this summer, it brings over a number of popular iOS features, including notifications, reminders, Twitter integration and iMessage, plus synchronization with iCloud.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is adding the tile-centric Metro interface from Windows Phone 7, an app store, improved mobile broadband support and better instant-on and instant-off abilities.

Perhaps most importantly, Windows 8 will support the power-savvy ARM chips found in phones and tablets, in addition to the Intel and AMD chips that have traditionally powered Windows PCs.

This isn’t a one-time move, either. The first Lion was also an attempt at the same thing, adding support for full-screen apps and other features first shown on the iPhone and iPad.

Such moves make sense. Not only are smartphones and their apps rapidly growing in adoption, but people expect their computers — especially laptops — to be just as mobile. And the next generation of computer users are growing up expecting everything to be like an iPad.

Apple and Microsoft are also once again close in timing for their new operating systems. Apple says Mountain Lion should be out this summer. Microsoft hasn’t given an exact timing for Windows 8, but chipmakers and PC manufacturers are counting on having Windows 8 machines ready later this year.

Apple released a developer preview version of Mountain Lion on Thursday, while Microsoft had its early version last fall. A “consumer preview” version of Windows 8 is slated to be released at the end of this month.

One area where Apple and Microsoft have differed is over touch capabilities. On the desktop, Apple has kept its gestures to the trackpad, rather than make its screens touch-sensitive.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has been early at bringing touch to the desktop and laptop. Windows 7 offered built-in multitouch support, and Windows 8 appears designed to be manipulated by hand, though it will work with keyboard and mouse.

Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg said that Apple and Microsoft are taking very different approaches.

“Microsoft wants them to look the same,” Gartenberg said. “Apple wants them to feel the same.”

Gartenberg said that Microsoft has struggled with a similar approach in the past, noting that Windows Mobile initially aimed to replicate the Windows desktop down to the start menu — an approach that was not popular with consumers.

“It seems like Microsoft is again trying to say let’s make one size fit all,” he said. “That hasn’t worked out particularly well for them in the past. It feels like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.”

Apple, Gartenberg said, is trying to replicate some of the experiences popular on the iPhone and iPad, but is doing so in a more context-aware manner that reflects the different way computers are used as compared with phones and tablets.

“The market will decide which one fundamentally works better,” he said.

Why Today Is a Very Good Day to Update Java on Your Computer

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:45:03 +0000

Consider yourself warned: Today is a very good day to update the version of Java running on your computer. This applies to you whether you run Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. If you’ve noticed your machine suggesting that you update Java, do it right away.

The reason? A scary vulnerability in Java that was detected over the summer, and which Oracle has subsequently fixed, is being exploited by people who create the malware and crimeware that causes so many headaches for home users and corporate IT departments.

The risk is especially acute at large companies with big fleets of desktops and notebooks to manage. If you’re a home user, the patch is easy to install. But most employees don’t have administrative privileges on their work desktops or notebooks, so someone from the IT department has to come and install the patch for them.

That’s a big, time-consuming process, says HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7, a Cambridge, Mass-based company that specializes in helping companies stay ahead of new computer security vulnerabilities. He’s also the chief architect of Metasploit, which Rapid7 owns.

One of the reasons this particular vulnerability is so bad is that even after it was detected and fixed, it wasn’t fully understood how dangerous it is, Moore says. Crimeware creators somehow figured it out ahead of most security researchers, and started adding code to Web sites designed to take advantage of it. And that’s especially dangerous at this time of the year, when people are shopping online both at home and the office. “It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” Moore told me yesterday. Add to that the fact that many companies have IT staff taking vacation during the holiday season, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

Enterprise is historically bad at patching Java vulnerabilities anyway, because it doesn’t have the same automatic update tools that Windows or Adobe Flash does. “The tools for patching Java aren’t that great,” Moore told me. “A Java update just isn’t treated with the same fervor as a Windows update.”

So how bad is this one? The National Vulnerability Database rates it a 10 out of 10 on the severity scale, and also rates it as “low” on the access complexity scale — meaning it’s really easy for the bad guys to carry out an attack using it.

Security blogger Brian Krebs discovered the vulnerability being “weaponized,” that is, built into the software that computer criminals buy on the black market. For instance, those who have bought something called the Blackhole Exploit Kit, a $4,000 software toolkit used to target Windows machines, are getting automatic updates that include tools to take advantage of the Java vulnerability.

What to do until you can get all your machines updated with the latest version of Java? Simple, really: Disable it and block it at the firewall, until all the machines on the network that need the update have it, Moore says.

Rapid7, incidentally, is a security company on the rise. Just last month it raised a $50 million series C round of funding, led by Technology Crossover Ventures and joined by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures; Tim McAdam, a TCV partner, joined Rapid7′s board.

Say, When Did Apple Become an Enterprise Company?

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:45:18 +0000

Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t dialed in to an Apple earnings call in more than a year since leaving my old job. But it sure sounded like a new thing to me when Apple CEO Tim Cook rattled off a list of large companies using the iPhone.

Here’s the direct quote taken from the transcript:

“IPhone continues to be adopted as the standard across the enterprise with 93 percent of the Fortune 500 deploying or testing the device, up from 91 percent last quarter and 60 percent of the Global 500 testing or deploying iPhone, up from 57 percent last quarter. A recent example of iPhone’s enterprise success is Lowe’s. Lowe’s is in the process of rolling out over 40,000 iPhones with a custom application to allow their store associates to execute real-time inventory checks, product orders and interactive customers with how-to videos.

Additional examples of companies around the world supporting iPhone on their corporate networks include L’Oreal, Royal Bank of Scotland, SAP, Texas Instruments, Jacobs Engineering Group, Tenet Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Lincoln National and CSX Corporation. And of course, we’re thrilled to begin shipping iPhone 4S this month.”

And later, a similar section devoted to the iPad:

“Every day, we learn about innovative new ways our enterprise customers are using iPad. The airline industry is a great example of the momentum we’re seeing. United Continental Holdings is putting iPads in every cockpit to replace heavy, paper-based flight bags. In Japan, All Nippon Airways is now using iPad in training programs for flight attendants.

Sonic Automotive is using iPad for customer check-in at the service department and also to provide analytics to regional managers. Aflac, Biogen and General Mills have developed internal apps that their field sales teams leverage daily, and technicians of Siemens Energy are bringing iPads along when they do maintenance work at the top of their wind turbines.”

It turns out that it’s not a new thing, exactly. Cook has recited similar lists on Apple conference calls before. But as recently as 2008, when Businessweek published its cover story called “The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit” (which, full disclosure, I worked on), Apple was generally considered an outsider in the enterprise IT business, and Apple products a novelty in the office. In broad brushstrokes, Macs tended to show up at media and advertising companies, and in the creative and marketing departments of other companies. The iPhone, and later the iPad, changed all that.

Here’s about as good an indication of that trend as I’ve ever seen: Intermedia, a company that operated a hosted Microsoft Exchange service for small and mid-sized businesses, said earlier this month that among its 41,000 customers, 78 percent are using Apple devices to get their mail, contact lists and calendars.

Meanwhile, look at all the companies that have developed enterprise applications for iOS: Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Citrix immediately come to mind. And Tidemark — the business intelligence start-up I wrote about yesterday — is iPad-ready from the start. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of examples I’m missing.

Apple has cumulatively sold 40 million iPads since the device launched last year. The company doesn’t offer much in the way of a data breakdown of how many of those are sold to businesses, but it almost doesn’t matter, because in so many cases, people buy one and just take it to the office. When you hear the phrase “consumerization of IT,” which already feels pretty worn out to me, it refers mostly to people who want to use iOS devices at work, and to a lesser extent, Google’s Android. A recent survey of 750 IT managers found that the iPhone led the pack of personal devices used at work, followed by Android Phones and the iPad.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised by all this, but when I heard Tim Cook list all those big companies using iThings to get things done, it finally dawned on me: Apple is as much an enterprise story as it is a consumer story.

A Mac on Windows?

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:02:29 +0000

My goal is to watch video from Netflix and Amazon on my TV. Which of the set-top boxes you recently reviewed will allow me to do that?

Of the three I tested, only the Roku 2 player will deliver both of these particular services, plus others, to your TV. It starts at $60, plus the cost of a subscription to Netflix or downloads from Amazon. The other two—Apple TV and Boxee Box—do provide Netflix, plus some services the Roku lacks, such as iTunes for Apple TV and Vudu for Boxee.

In your column last week, you noted that the latest version of Parallels Desktop for Mac can run a second copy of the Mac operating system inside a virtual computer on a Mac. Will it also allow people to run the Mac OS on a Windows PC?

No, according to both Apple and Parallels. First of all, the new Parallels product, which is mainly meant to run a virtual or faux Windows computer on a Mac, can run only on Mac hardware.

The company does make a similar product that runs on PC hardware, but Apple says its Mac operating system is designed to only boot up on Mac hardware, even if it is installed in a virtual computer.

I know that some techies and engineers have been able to get around this and run the Mac OS on PC hardware, but it often doesn’t run perfectly normally, and I don’t believe average users can pull this off in any case.

I am interested in a tablet for reading books, newspapers and magazines, email and light Web surfing. Which tablet do you recommend?

Assuming that, by “tablet,” you are excluding simple monochrome e-readers like the current Amazon Kindle, I’d recommend the iPad. It’s the best overall tablet I’ve tested, with the best battery life and the greatest variety of apps. All of the tablet contenders can do email and Web surfing adequately, but the iPad has a greater selection of newspaper and magazine apps.

However, there are two caveats. One is that the iPad cannot display Flash video, so if that is of prime importance, look elsewhere. The other is that Amazon is widely expected to soon offer a more limited, but less expensive, color tablet that—given Amazon’s business—might well be very good for books, newspapers and magazines. So you might want to wait to evaluate that product.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Lion With Office

Walt Mossberg — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:02:29 +0000

I have been warned on the Web that Microsoft Office won’t work on Apple’s new Mac operating system, Lion. Is this true?

In my tests, and also according to Microsoft, Office for the Mac does work in Lion, though some relatively minor features won’t work right. Also, you must be using one of the two latest versions of Office.

In my tests, using the current version, Office 2011, all features I tested worked fine, though of course I wasn’t able to test every one of the thousands of features. I even wrote my entire Lion review in Word 2011 on a Lion-equipped Mac. According to Microsoft, the 2008 version also works, though the 2004 version doesn’t.

However, Microsoft hasn’t updated Office for Mac to take advantage of Lion’s new features. More information on Mac Office compatibility with Lion is here and here.

Can you point me in the right direction for a purchase of a tablet? I am a home inspector and presently use a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a special Windows software program for my job. I need a tablet with a screen size of 12 inches or more. USB ports would be essential.

I am willing to spend up to $3,000. I need it to be visible in daylight, because I must walk around the property.

You may have trouble finding a tablet that meets all your criteria. If you need to run special Windows software on a tablet with a USB port, you might consider one of the Windows 7 models, aimed mainly at businesses. A good example is the $1200 Asus Eee Slate EP121. I haven’t tested it, but it has a 12″ screen, dual USB ports, and works with either finger or stylus input. The only problem is that it uses a backlit, laptop-type screen, and these aren’t typically great for viewing in direct sunlight.

An Apple store employee told us that each Apple mobile device battery should be depleted to 0% once per month to keep its battery healthy. Is this necessary?

That’s correct. Here’s part of the company’s advice on iPhone batteries: “For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).”

In its advice on laptop batteries, the company states, in part: “Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time.” It adds that, if you don’t drain and recharge your Mac laptop in the course of normal usage, “Apple recommends charging and discharging its battery at least once per month.”

Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Courage for Lion Users

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:58:01 +0000

Apple’s Lion has roared onto Macs, with one million downloads of the new operating system in the first day it was available. IPhone or iPad users will be familiar with Lion’s nod toward navigating with gestures. But for others, Lion could be uncharted territory. I’ve compiled some helpful shortcuts and tips for using Lion and some of its less-obvious yet useful features.

For those people frustrated by Lion, I’ll also include instructions on how to revert some features to work the way they did in Apple’s previous operating system, Snow Leopard. If all else fails, I’ll tell you how to uninstall Lion altogether. But all new operating systems require an adjustment period, so give yourself some time with Lion before giving up.

[ See post to watch video ]

Heads or Tails of Scrolling

Probably the one feature that will take the most getting used to is Lion’s new way of scrolling. Rather than placing two fingers on the touch pad and moving them down together to navigate down in a Web page, list or document, Lion does the opposite. Think of reading a real piece of paper: As you read down, your eyes would move down and you’d push the paper up. So now, scrolling down happens by putting two fingers on the touch pad and moving up. Scrolling up works by moving two fingers down the touch pad. The scroll bar disappears when you aren’t scrolling.

If you’d rather switch back to the classic way of scrolling, go to System Preferences, Trackpad, Scroll & Zoom and uncheck “Scroll direction: natural.” Also go into System Preferences, Mouse, Point & Click and uncheck “Scroll direction: natural.” If you desperately miss seeing your scrollbar, go to System Preferences, General, Show scroll bars and choose “Always” in the top of the middle section.

Uncovering Exposé

If you’re like me, you loved using Snow Leopard’s Exposé, which took a four-finger downward swipe to expose all running apps. Lion has a more robust way of viewing all the things on a Mac, called Mission Control. A feature called App Exposé uses a three-finger downward swipe to expose all windows running in an app. This isn’t on by default, so go to System Preferences, Trackpad, select the More Gesture section (top right) and check the box for App Exposé.

To use a four-finger-swipe for this, I selected the tiny arrow in this command’s description and chose “Swipe Down with four fingers.”

Several new gestures are built into Lion for navigating to things like the Desktop, Launchpad and Mission Control. But if you don’t want to learn a bunch of new gestures, you can try Hot Corners. These let you navigate to these features by just moving the cursor to any corner of the computer screen.

Set up Hot Corners by going to System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver, select Screen Saver and then click on Hot Corners in the lower left. Here, you can use drop-down menus to designate how each corner will function.

You’ve Got New Mail

Apple Mail has been updated in Lion to look better and work better. Rather than displaying all messages in a top section with the body of one message shown in a window below, emails are displayed in a left-hand column with bodies of those emails displayed on the right.

If you’re yearning for the way things used to be, select Mail, Preferences, Viewing and check the box labeled “Use classic layout.” If you’d like to see icons representing folders and mailboxes on the left, like the old Mail, click “Show (or Hide to hide this)” in the Favorites Bar of Mail.

Another change in mail is conversation view, which is on by default. It numbers messages in an email back-and-forth so you know what order they go in, rather than wondering which message was most recently received. To turn off conversation view, click on the View menu in Mail and uncheck “Organize by Conversation.”

Full Screen—Finally

At last, getting a full-screen view of an opened window on a Mac doesn’t have to be done by dragging out corners of the window.

Clicking on a full-screen button (two outward-facing arrows) built into many programs in the top-right corner lets the window truly take over the entire screen, like it’s the only thing that works on the whole computer.

Several apps can run in full-screen mode at once, and swiping three fingers left or right on a laptop’s touch pad will switch between these running apps.

Clean Up Launchpad

A new gesture—pinching with your thumb and three fingers—pulls up Launchpad. This resembles the iPhone or iPad home screen, with everything on the Mac represented by small icons. Some icons are already grouped into folders, like Microsoft Office programs, if you have Office installed. Others can be grouped into folders just like on an iOS device: by dragging and dropping them onto one another to create a folder and then naming that folder.

To delete these icons, click on one and hold down until all icons start jiggling. Those icons for apps downloaded from the App Store can be deleted right here, just click on the small “x” that appears to the top left of each app icon. Other programs can be deleted only by opening the Applications folder in Finder and moving unwanted things to Trash.

Give Up?

If you absolutely give up on the Lion upgrade you downloaded and want to revert back to the Snow Leopard operating system, you’ll need to erase your drive and reinstall Snow Leopard from the original installation discs.

Before you do this, back up your data in Time Machine so it can later be moved back onto the machine.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katherine.boehret@wsj.com

Apple's Lion Brings PCs Into Tablet Era

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:32:31 +0000

With its iPhones and iPads, Apple has led people toward a new way of operating digital devices that relies on direct manipulation of items with finger gestures, not a mouse and scroll bars. App icons are arrayed front and center, not buried deep in a file system or limited to a strip at the bottom of the screen.

[ See post to watch video ]

Now, Apple is bringing those concepts and others to the personal computer via its most radical new Macintosh operating system version in years. It’s called Lion and it goes on sale Wednesday for $29.99—a price that allows installation on as many personal Macs as you own.

Lion is a giant step in the merger of the personal computer and post-PC devices like tablets and smartphones. It demotes the venerable scroll bar at the side of windows and documents, relying primarily on direct manipulation of documents and lists. It eliminates the need to save your work, automatically saving every version of every document. It resumes programs right where you left off. It can display programs, or an array of all your app icons, in multiple full screens you simply swipe through. And it elevates the role of multitouch gestures and adds new ones.

The new system doesn’t turn a Mac into a tablet. It retains traditional computer features not present on smaller devices—like the usual file system, multiple windows, the mouse and physical keyboard. It still runs traditional Mac programs, still can handle Adobe Flash, and doesn’t run iPhone or iPad apps. It doesn’t use a touch screen, instead continuing to rely on the touch pad to perform finger gestures.

But it’s a big change. Lion also is a harbinger of things to come. Apple’s historic rival, Microsoft, is working on its own radical overhaul of the dominant Windows PC operating system, due next year, which is also aimed at putting multitouch and other concepts borrowed from smartphones and tablets front and center.

I’ve been testing Lion on four Macs, and I like it. I believe its many new features—250 in all—make computing easier and more reliable. I found upgrading easy, and compatibility with existing apps to be very good. Only one app I use frequently proved incompatible, and its maker says a new revision solves that problem.

I only suffered one crash in Lion. It occurred on one of many occasions I used iTunes, but Apple says a forthcoming version of iTunes made for Lion should eliminate that.

Pressing a special key on a new Mac, or an icon on an old one, brings up a full screen, iPad-like display of app icons.

To take full advantage of new features such as full-screen mode (which hides menus), auto-saving and auto-resuming, programs will have to be rewritten. But, in my tests, current versions ran fine. I am writing this column on a MacBook Air running Lion using an unrevised version of Microsoft Word for the Mac, with no problems.

An Adjustment Process

There are, however, downsides to anything this new and major. In my view, the biggest of these is that switching to Lion will require a major adjustment even for veteran Mac users, though it will be easier for those who use iPhones or iPads. Lion will significantly increase the learning curve for Windows users switching to the Mac.

One of the biggest changes is in scrolling. Instead of moving the top of a page upward by dragging the scroll bar down, or moving your fingers downward on the touch pad, you do the opposite—you just push the page up. A scroll bar appears only while scrolling. (Older programs may still have the traditional scroll bar.)

Standard programs and features like Apple Mail are significantly different, too, and there are smaller changes in almost every corner of the operating system, including some keyboard shortcuts. Just mastering all the new and altered touch-pad gestures—a couple of which are so unnatural I actually had to practice them—will take time. (Luckily, almost all of the actions performed by the gestures can also be done with a mouse, icons, menu commands, or keys.)

If you dislike some of these changes, Apple provides settings to return to traditional scrolling, the classic Mail layout, and to turn off gestures and other things.

Upgrading

Another big change is in the way Lion is being distributed. It won’t be sold on a disk, initially only via download from the Mac App Store. Since it’s a 4 gigabyte download, that could be a problem for people with slow Internet connections. Apple says its stores will help such users with the download, and that it will sell Lion on a USB thumb drive for $69 in August.

In my tests, the download alone took under half an hour on a very fast connection, and about an hour and a half on a more typical one. Once I downloaded the product, the rest of the installation took about an hour.

Also, you can only upgrade to Lion directly from the prior OS version, Snow Leopard. So, if you’re running an earlier version, you’ll first have to pay to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Each auto-save creates a “version” of a document and all the versions can be viewed in a visual stack.

In addition, Macs with the older PowerPC processors can’t run Lion, and even some of the earliest Macs with Intel processors are shut out. These are mainly machines released in 2006. Older programs originally designed for PowerPC, which still ran on Snow Leopard, will no longer work in Lion. The best known of these is Intuit’s Quicken 2007.

Migrating

Even if you buy a new Mac with Lion pre-installed and your older Mac has Snow Leopard, you’ll have to download a new version of Apple’s migration program for Snow Leopard in order to move over all your programs, settings and files. The company made this new migration utility available on Tuesday. When I tried to migrate my stuff from a Snow Leopard machine to Lion using the current migration program—normally a strength for Apple—the process failed. Apple sent me the new version and it worked.

Lion also introduces a new migration feature that will move data and settings—but not programs—from a Windows PC to a Mac, though it requires a free Windows migration utility that Apple couldn’t provide in time for this review.

New Macs

Speaking of Macs with Lion pre-installed, Apple also is upgrading its thin and fast MacBook Air laptops so they use faster chips from Intel. It’s killing off the bottom model of its laptop line, the plain MacBook. But the new MacBook Airs, available Thursday, have the same design, prices and base storage capacity as their predecessors, so this review is focused on Lion.

Features

Here are some of the main new features in Lion:

• Auto-Save and Versions: Apps running in Lion automatically save your work when you pause or every five minutes. There is no interruption during this process and you can still save manually. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s implemented beautifully and can work on all programs whose authors issue new versions to take advantage of it. Right now, it works on some of Apple’s own programs.

The best part of this is that each auto-save creates a “version” of your document and you can view all these versions in a visual stack arranged by date, next to your current version. You can swap back to an older version, or even copy and paste text from one version to another. These versions are created by storing the changes behind the scenes, not by creating numerous files.

To prevent auto-saving, you can lock a document and, for privacy, when you share or transfer a document, only the latest version is copied or sent.

• Resume: If you relaunch a program, any document you were working on appears again with the cursor right where it was, and even any highlighting is preserved. If you restart the Mac, all your programs are resumed in this manner, unless you check a box to prevent this.

• Full-screen apps: You can launch some apps, or individual browser tabs, in a full screen, by just clicking on an icon at the top right. In full screen, the menu bar and other controls are hidden unless you move the cursor to the top of the screen.

• Launchpad: Pressing a special key on a new Mac, or an icon on an old one, brings up an iPad-like display of all your app icons in full screen. If they occupy more than one screen, you just swipe through them.

• Mission Control: One of the nicer features on the Mac was called Exposé, which, with one click, showed all your open windows in miniature. Now, it’s been subsumed into something called Mission Control, which does the same thing, but also displays any fullscreen apps or extra desktops. I found it cluttered and wished the simpler, prior feature had been retained.

• Gestures: The Mac already had a variety of iPhone-like gestures you could perform on the touch pad. But Lion has changed some of these and added more. One I liked: You can double-tap with two figures to resize a section of a Web page or PDF to zoom in to fill the screen, just like on the iPhone or iPad. Two I dislike: the gestures for calling up Launchpad and Mission Control require pinching or zooming with three fingers and a thumb—a clumsy method for such important features.

• Mail: Apple’s Mail app has been totally overhauled to look and work more like the Mail app on the iPad. One particularly nice feature is that it sports a beautiful optional conversation mode, which combines and numbers each message in a thread. It also hides duplicate emails. There are too many changes to detail here, but, after hating the new Mail at first, I have come to like it. And you can switch to Classic mode if you wish.

The Bottom Line

The past two major computer operating system releases, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, were incremental. Lion is very different. It’s a big leap, and gives the Mac a much more modern look and feel for a world of tablets and smartphones. If you are willing to adjust, it’s the best computer operating system out there.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Apple Confirms Mac OS Lion Launching on Wednesday

Ina Fried — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:08:04 +0000

Apple confirmed that it plans to launch the next version of its Mac OS X operating system, Lion, on Wednesday.

Speaking on a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, CFO Peter Oppenheimer confirmed the launch date. The company had previously said it would launch this month and it had been widely expected to go on sale this week.

Lion, which will be sold via the Mac App Store, rather than through retail or other channels, includes more than 250 new features, including a number designed to bring to the Mac some features popular on the iPad.

Earlier on Tuesday, the company reported blowout earnings paced by far stronger than expected sales of the iPhone and iPad.

Also on the conference call, Oppenheimer confirmed the company sold all the iPads it could make during the quarter, with 1.05 million iPads in channel inventory, up slightly from the prior quarter, but below the company’s intended target of having 4-6 weeks’ worth of channel inventory.

The company also again said that it is seeing far greater than expected iPad adoption by businesses, including for sales, in retail and in hospitals.

On the retail front, the company plans to open 30 new stores before the end of September, including its first store in Hong Kong.

Three Things to Take Away From Apple's WWDC Announcements (Video)

Ina Fried — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 23:43:31 +0000

Just after Steve Jobs wrapped up his Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote, I had a chance to chat with The Wall Street Journal Digital Network’s Lauren Goode about what to take away from the big event. That video appears below, followed by a second post-event video with additional reflections.

Here are a few things that struck me.

1. Clearly, Apple is learning from the mobile competition.

Although Apple has had the lead in a lot of mobile areas, the new iOS 5 software picks up on a few things where the competition was ahead. The new operating system will offer improved notifications in a manner quite reminiscent of Android. Meanwhile, the new software will also be able to go straight to the camera app from the lock screen, a favorite feature of Windows Phone 7. The company is also taking over some ground previously handled by third-party applications, such as Instapaper.

2. Apple just might get sync right.

Microsoft has been trying to allow users to sync their data for a while via Windows Live Mesh and other services, but nothing they have proposed is as elegant as the iCloud service that Steve Jobs outlined on Monday. Google, meanwhile, has proposed a cloud-only approach.

But Apple’s approach seems to give users what they really want–their photos, documents and other data on all their devices, synchronized automatically while also stored locally on the device. Of course, the devil is in the details and we won’t be able to see just how effortlessly it all works until the service launches with iOS 5 this fall.

3. Apple’s Lion is interesting not just for its features, but also for how it is being distributed.

The features of Lion are interesting, particularly when compared with the also-mobile-influenced Windows 8. However, what struck me even more is the fact that Apple is distributing it in an entirely new way. Rather than sell it on discs through retailers, the new Mac OS X will come via the Mac App Store for just under $30.

[ See post to watch video ]

Complete coverage:

Apple's Lion and Microsoft's Windows 8 Both Show Mobile's Influence

Ina Fried — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:12:50 +0000

In the past week, both Apple and Microsoft have laid out their next computer operating systems. In both cases, the features and design of the software are influenced heavily by what is going on in the phone and tablet markets.

Although both Windows 8 and Mac OS X Lion aim to bring a more phone-like operating system to notebooks and laptops, each has centered on different aspects of the mobile operating system.

With the Windows 8 design shown at the D9 conference last week, Microsoft has focused heavily on the way programs are organized and launched on phones, using a start screen that closely resembles Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft didn’t go into great detail on Windows 8, but among the features it did show was a lock screen that appeared to have notifications similar to those found on a phone. It also showed the ability from within newly redesigned Windows apps to access documents like photos without having to hunt through the traditional Windows file system.

Apple, meanwhile, previewed Lion on Monday, showing a number of elements that are migrating to the Mac from iOS, including the automatic saving of documents, push notifications and greater multitouch gesture control. Apple had talked about bringing the best of iOS to the Mac when it first talked about Lion at a “Back to the Mac” event last October.

Both Apple and Microsoft have noted immersive, full-screen apps as one compelling feature from mobile operating systems that has a place on the desktop as well. Both also have built-in app stores, a notion popularized by Apple on the phone.

There are other mobile influences in both products. Windows 8, for example, will be the first version of Windows to run on ARM-based processors, common on mobile devices. As for Lion, it is the first Mac OS X release that won’t come on disk, instead being offered for download via the Mac App Store.

Although Apple would clearly like to capitalize on the popularity of the iPad and iPhone, for Microsoft the need to add mobile features is perhaps even greater, as the company is counting on Windows 8 not only to take on the Mac, but also to regain ground lost to both the iPad and Android in the tablet space.

Lion is, of course, much further along, with developers getting a new release this week and general availability slated for next month. Microsoft has only showed a glimpse of Windows 8, with a wide release not expected until next year and the first beta unlikely to come before a September developer conference.

For a look at what Windows 8 has in store, here’s the video of the demo from D9 last week:

[ See post to watch video ]

Complete coverage:

Apple: Mac OS X Lion Coming in July Via Mac App Store

Ina Fried — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:14:46 +0000

Apple said Monday that Lion, the next version of Mac OS X, will be a major release with over 250 new features and go on sale in July for $29.99.

Instead of shipping on a disk, though, the 4GB upgrade will come via the Mac App Store and work on all the Macs that one owns.

“That allows us to make it the easiest upgrade you have ever seen,” Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller said.

Steve Jobs kicked off Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference, but gave way to Schiller and Mac OS X VP Craig Federighi to show off Lion.

“The Mac is doing incredibly well,” Schiller said, noting that the Mac has outpaced overall PC growth every quarter for the last five years. Since he didn’t have time to show off all the new features, Schiller said he would focus on 10 new features, starting with improved multitouch gestures and full-screen applications.

“There is so much more,” Schiller said, showing a list of other features, including new tools to migrate from a Windows machine, FaceTime video chat, FileVault 2 encryption and 3,000 new programming interfaces.

Safari and Mail, as well as Apple’ iLife and iWork apps have all been tailored to run in full-screen mode, Schiller said. Among the new features in Safari is a reading list for pages one wants to get to later.

A trio of features are aimed at making the Mac as resilient as a tablet or phone. Lion will now allow users to resume a Mac OS X session after restarting with all of the same windows and programs open. The software will also auto-save documents and allow users to choose from earlier saved versions. It works similar to the “time machine” backup feature for file backup and recovery.

“You have the power of all of this right from the title bar of your window,” Schiller said. “It’s very efficient. We only store the difference.”

Also, unlike with Word, Lion doesn’t share all the changes with users when a document is shared.

AirDrop is designed to allow for easy file sharing using peer-to-peer networking with another Mac user running AirDrop. With a simple confirmation on both ends, the file is sent wirelessly.

“That’s it,” Schiller said. Until now, Schiller said the easiest way has been to use a flash drive.

Mission Control is a Lion feature that unites Apple’s multiple means of bringing together widgets and open windows.

“For many people this will be the best feature of Lion,” Schiller said.

Lion will also include a Mac App Store built in, though Snow Leopard users have been enjoying this as an add-on to their OS for a while. Schiller noted that the Mac App Store is now the largest channel for buying software.

“It’s built right in,” Schiller said, noting that the Mac App Store will also allow in-app purchases, incremental updates as well as the ability to have applications run in their own “sandbox,” where they are secured from other apps.

Finally, Schiller showed a rewritten Mail app that he billed as enterprise-class. Among its features are a new conversation view as well as search suggestions that aim to make it easier to find things from within a large mail store.

The company first previewed Lion and a few of its features at a “Back to the Mac” event last October.

For all the latest from WWDC, check out our ongoing live blog of Monday’s keynote.

Complete coverage:

WWDC 2011: Apple CEO Steve Jobs Takes the Stage

Ina Fried — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:02:36 +0000

Apple began its Worldwide Developer Conference with perhaps the most important introduction of all: CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave since January, announced last week that he would be on hand to kick off the developer conference, at which Apple is expected to detail Lion, the next version of Mac OS X, as well as iOS 5, the next release of the iPhone and iPad operating system.

Jobs received a standing ovation as he took to the stage promptly at 10 a.m. PT.

“I love you,” shouted one attendee.

“It always helps,” Jobs said. “I appreciate it,” he said, before promising an “awesome morning.”

If hardware is the brain and sinew of Apple’s products, “the software in them is their soul,” he said. “Today we are going to talk about software.”

For all the latest from WWDC, check out our ongoing live blog of Monday’s keynote.

Complete coverage:

Apple Heads for the Cloud, for Real: Here's What's Coming From Lion, iOS5 and iCloud

John Paczkowski — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:41:10 +0000

This morning at Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference, CEO Steve Jobs and several other executives kicked off the event with a keynote that focused on iOS 5, OS X Lion and iCloud, the company’s “upcoming cloud services offering.”

Here’s the liveblog, photos and analysis.

8:43 am: AllThingsD is here at WWDC.

8:46 am: Among the signage here at Moscone are two massive banners, both of them hidden by blackout cloth.

9:44 am: Inside and situated after a Monsters of Rock-style stampede for choice press seats. If you’re a tech company about to announce an earnings shortfall or scandal, now would be the ideal time.

9:52 am: No Beatles or Dylan blaring from the speakers today. The soundtrack for this morning’s event seems to be late-60s soul, Eddie Floyd, etc.

9:58 am: We’re just a few minutes from kick-off, I think. Now playing, James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” Opening screech draws chuckles from the crowd.

10:01 am: Looks like that was Steve Jobs’s intro music. The lights dim and he takes the stage. Standing ovation.

10:02 am: From the crowd: “We love you, Steve.”

Jobs: “Thanks, that always helps.”

10:02 am: Jobs begins with some WWDC metrics: 5,200 attendees, over 1,000 Apple engineers on site.

10:03 am: “If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul. Today we’re going to talk about software: Lion, iOS 5 and some interesting cloud stuff.

10:04 am: First up: Lion. Jobs hands off to Phil Schiller who begins with some metrics. Ha! I was just name-checked in an onstage slide–a quote about “the Mac kicking ass” from one of my posts.

10:05 am: Schiller says the Mac has outgrown the PC every quarter for the past 5 years. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.”

Now, a quick historical overview of the Mac OS, including some screenshots of the first iteration of OS X and its evolution.

10:07 am: Schiller says Lion is a major refresh of OS X and has some 250 new features. He’s going to focus on 10 today. The first: multitouch gestures: scrolling, tap to zoom, swipe, pinch motions…

“These things have implications across the system,” Schiller says. “The scrollbar, for example,” he says. You don’t really need it anymore. Or as much, anyway. In Lion, the scrollbar disappears when you don’t need it and reappears when you do.

10:09 am: Moving on now to full screen apps. In Lion, you can run a number of full-screen apps at the same time and switch easily between them. Shows off Safari, iCal, Calendar, all running in full screen.

10:10 am: Up next: Mission Control.
Schiller: “Mission control gives you a birds-eye view of everything going on in your system,” Schiller says, adding that you can have multiple desktops and apps running and use Mission Control to get to any of them easily.

10:11 am: “You don’t need the scrollbar anymore because you can simple push through things with your finger,” says Federighi, who has picked up the demo from Schiller.

10:12 am: Slick feature: Swipe through Safari’s browsing history.

10:13 am: You can also swipe through full-screen apps going from Safari to iPhoto with a simple gesture. Transition is fluid, seamless.

10:14 am: Demo of Photobooth running in full-screen mode. New enhancements allow you to put Looney Tunes-style cuckoo birds around your head, etc.

10:15 am: Three-finger swipe puts you in Mission Control from full-screen apps. Spacebar gives users a “quick look” at a specific window by enlarging it.

10:16 am: Schiller talks a bit about the Mac App Store. “In the last six months, the Mac App Store has become the number one PC channel for buying software, surpassing Best Buy and Office Depot.”

10:18 am: So what’s new for the App Store in Lion? First off, it’s built right in. It also offers in-app purchases, push notifications, sand boxing and delta updates.

10:19 am: Moving on to Launchpad, which brings an iOS-like app schema to the Mac desktop. Multiple screens of icons, scroll between them.

10:20 am: Another new feature: “Resume.” “Resume works system wide to remember what app you were using and what you were doing with it.”

10:24 am: Demos of the features we’ve just heard about. Federighi takes the stage to show off the Mac App Store. He downloads Twitter from the App Store and it “magically flies” to the desktop.

Moving on to document editing now….He messes around in Pages for a bit and then quits. Notably, there is no “Do you want to save?” dialogue.

He fires up Pages again and the app takes him to exactly what he was working on when he closed it moments ago without saving.

10:27 am: Federighi adds that Lion saved not only the last version of his doc, but a few earlier versions as well–all without his intervention.

10:28 am: Another new feature: Airdrop. “This is a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi-based network,” says Schiller.

Airdrop creates a sort of subnetwork among Lion users that allows dragging and dropping of files via the finder. Looks elegant and easy.

10:30 am: Moving on to Mail. “Lion has a completely new version of Mail,” says Schiller. There’s a favorites bar, a message skimmer and, thankfully, a better search. “You can create boolean searches if you want,” says Schiller.

10:31 am: Another new Mail feature: conversation view. This shows messages from a single thread in a single view, complete with attachments.

10:33 am: Search in the new Mail appears far more granular. Multiple search terms allow far more focused and effective searches.

10:34 am: A nice addition. Conversations hides the redundant text you often get in CCs, but allows you to expand if needed.

10:35 am: Schiller now running through a smorgasboard of new features in Lion. 3000 new APIs for devs.

10:36 am: When it’s released, Lion will be available only from the Mac App Store. No more DVDs.

10:36 am: It will be about 4 GB in size and will install in place. It can also be installed on all authorized Macs.

So what will it cost? $29. Lots of applause for that.

10:38 am: New developer preview available today. Official release will follow in July.

10:38 am: Scott Forstall takes the stage to talk about iOS 5.

10:38 am: 200 million iOS devices sold to date, says Forstall. “That makes iOS the number one mobile operating system with more than 44 percent of the market.”

10:39 am: Here’s our full rundown on Mac OS X Lion.

10:39 am: “In 14 months, we”re sold more than 25 million iPads,” says Forstall.

More metrics:
- 15 billion songs sold via iTunes
- 130 million books downloads from iBooks
- 425,000 apps in the app store, 90,000 specifically for the iPad
- 14 billion apps downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years
- $2.5 billion paid to developers building apps for the app store

10:42 am: Quick overview of some high-profile apps. HBO Go, WebEx, etc.

10:43 am: More metrics: 225 million iTunes store accounts all with credit cards and 1-click purchasing.

10:43 am: And now, iOS 5….

Forstall: “This is a major release for our devleopers and our customers….More than 200 new features.”

10:44 am: Forstall will walk us through 10 of that 200. The first: Notifications.

10:44 am: Apple’s already pushed 100 billion push notifications, but it’s been hearing that folks would like a better UI. People don’t want to deal with modal alerts, etc.

Notification Center will fix this. It’s a single screen that lists your various notifications–missed calls, Facebook updates–all accessible with a top down finger swipe.

10:46 am: Notifications are now less intrusive. They appear at the top of the screen without interrupting the app currently in use and then auto-dismiss after a few moments.

10:48 am: Tap on a notification and it takes you to the app that generated it. Tap again and it takes you back to Notification Center.

10:48 am: Number two: Newsstand. Forstall talks for a moment about the breadth of magazine and newspaper content available for iPad. “We’ve now created a single place for all these publications in the App Store. When you purchase them, they’re all downloaded to Newsstand via background downloads.”

Newsstand has an iBooks-esque UI.

10:50 am: Next up: Twitter.

10:51 am: “IOS users send more than 1 billion Tweets a week,” says Forstall. “We know Twitter is an important app for our users, so we want to make it easier to use.”

How?

A few ways: single sign-on, photo-integration, location integration.

“In addition to this, you can Tweet articles from Safari and videos from YouTube.”

10:53 am: Moving on to Safari. More than two thirds of mobile Web browsing is done on Safari, says Forstall, before running through some new features Apple is adding to it.

10:54 am: First, an improved version of Safari Reader that, frankly, looks like it’s going to kill Instapaper. Second, “Reading List,” an easy way to save stories to read later. Reading List syncs across iOS devices, so if you save something on iPhone, you can read it later on iPad. Third: tabbed browsing.

10:55 am Moving on now to a new feature called “Reminders,” which seems to be a Remember The Milk-style app.

10:58 am: Create lists of to-dos, associate a time with them and even a location with a geofence so that if you attempt to leave a particular location without completing a certain task, iOS will remind you to do it when you move out of a certain area.

11:00 am: Another nice new feature: A lock-screen shortcut for the camera. No need to worry if you have a passcode set, either. Camera evidently ignores it, but still keeps the device locked until the passcode is entered.

11:01 am: Also new in camera: optional gridlines, in-camera pinch-to-zoom, and in-camera editing with crop and rotate, red-eye removal and one-click enhance.

11:02 am: Now, iOS Mail. A bevvy of new features: rich text formatting, indentation control, draggable addresses, message flagging, search entire message (not just from and to), swipe to inbox.

11:06 am: Ah, here’s a slick new feature. A split keyboard for iPad that makes it easier to type.

11:07 am: Next up: PC Free. The mere mention of the phrase is met by so much cheering and applause, Forstall has to pause for a moment until it dies down.

11:07 am: “We know we’re selling into a lot of households that don’t have computers, but want iOS devices. So we’re making that possible.” How? You can now set up iOS devices on the devices themselves and software updates are available over the air.

11:09 am: “If you want to cut the cord, now you can.” Forstall concludes the PC Free demo and moves quickly to GameCenter.

Game Center currently has 50 million users, says Forstall, adding that XBox Live, which has been around for a lot longer, only has about 30 million.

New in Game Center, game discovery and game downloads from within Game Center. Also support for turn-based games right out of the box in iOS 5.

11:12 am: Next: Messaging. IPod touch and iPad users have been asking for a messaging service, so we’re giving them one. It’s called iMessage and it runs on all iOS devices–iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

IMessage includes delivery receipts and read receipts, and is supported over 3G and Wi-Fi. IMessages are pushed to iOS devices. They’re also encrypted.

11:14 am: In a nod to iOS’s new notifications system, iMessages are non-intrusive. They don’t interrupt game play, for example.

11:16 am: “We’re building this on our new push notification system so we know how to scale this,” says Forstall.

11:17 am: Forstall runs through some other new iOS features: AirPlay mirroring and Wi-Fi backup to iTunes are two of the big ones. Also new features for devs: Core Image, Customize UI…

11:18 am: All sounds great, but when will it arrive at market? A developer seed will be released today. iOS 5 itself will ship this fall. It will support everything from the iPhone 3Gs and up.

11:19 am: Forstall hands off to Jobs who returns to the stage to talk about iCloud. “We’ve been working on this for some time and we’re really excited about it….About 10 years ago, we realized that the PC was going to become the center of our digital lives, the place where we stored out photos and our music….And it did become that and it worked well for a while, but recently it’s broken down.”

11:21 am: Jobs continues noting how difficult it’s become to sync our media between various devices. “Keeping our devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he says. “But we have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.Now everything is in sync without even having to think about it.”

11:23 am: “ICloud stores your content in the cloud and automatically pushes it to all your devices. But it’s also completely integrated with your apps, so there’s nothing new to learn. It just all works. … Everything happens automatically and there is nothing new to learn.”

“Now I know what you’re thinking: why should we trust Apple,” Jobs says. “They’re the ones who brought us MobileMe. It wasn’t our finest hour–let me just say that–but we learned a lot from it.”

11:29 am: Three apps will be free–mail, contacts and calendar. Previously, they were part of $99 a year MobileMe service.

11:29 am: App Store and iBookstore will also allow access to previously purchased titles from the cloud.

There will also be a backup app with automatic backup of iOS devices to the cloud.

Daily backups of iCloud done automatically over Wi-Fi with camera roll, music, device settings and app data.

11:31 am: “We couldn’t stop there,” he said, noting there are three other apps.

“The first one is documents in the cloud,” Jobs said.

11:31 am: If you create a Pages document, on, say, an iPad, it automatically gets stored in the cloud and is automatically sent to other devices with Pages. It’s on all the iWork apps–Pages, Numbers and Keynote (including iPhone versions last week).

Demo from Roger Rosner, VP of iWork.

11:34 am: Jobs returns to the stage. “Today it is a real hassle to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” he says. “And that’s partly because of the file system. We’ve been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system,” said Jobs. “When you try and teach someone to use a Mac, everything is fine, until you show them the file system. On iOS, you don’t have to think about it. But how do you move those documents around? Now you can.”

“iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps. You don’t even need to think about it. It just works. ….Documents in the cloud really completes our document storage story. We can finally get rid of the file system. On iOS devices, you no longer have to worry about the file system. Documents in the cloud solves that problem for us.”

And it works not only across all iOS devices, but Macs and PCs too.

Apple plans to release iCloud storage APIs so developers can leverage iCloud in their own apps.

11:37 am: Another new cloud-based app: Photostream. “This may be my favorite iCloud app.”

“You take photos on any device and they will be automatically uploaded to the cloud where they will be stored and then automatically downloaded to all my other devices….You can also import photos and do the same thing…and we’ve built this right into the apps, so there’s nothing new to learn. You push a button and it’s right there.”

11:39 am: “On the Mac we built it right into iPhoto and on the PC, since they don’t have a photo app, we use the pictures folder….And we even built it into Apple TV. Apple TV talks directly to the PhotoStream service.”

11:40 am: Interesting. How’s Apple handling the no doubt significant memory issues around something like this?

On iOS devices, it’s storing the last 1000 photos, on Macs it’s storing them all. And it stores them for 30 days.

11:42 am: Eddy Cue takes the stage for a quick demo of Photostream. Using his iPhone, he snaps a few pictures of a toy Lightning McQueen car from Pixar’s “Cars” and bang they show up on his iPad and his Mac.

11:43 am: Jobs returns to the stage…

“So, photos you take or import/upload to iCloud, iCloud pushes them to all your devices, it stores them for 30 days, which is plenty of time….”

11:44 am: Moving on to iTunes.

“You know, it’s the same old story. I buy something on my iPhone and it’s not on my other devices. But I want it on my other devices.”

The first portion of Apple’s solution for that: from now on anything you’ve purchased from iTunes on one device can be re-downloaded to other devices.

11:46 am: Jobs: “And in the future, you can flip a switch in iTunes that will send any song you purchase on iTunes to all your devices.”

Interesting. There’s a new purchase tab in iTunes that lists all your iTunes purchases, tap the iCloud button and it sends the song to whatever device you’re viewing it on at no additional charge.

11:48 am: Buy a new song on iTunes and it automatically downloads to all your iOS devices. Eddy Cue demonstrates during an onstage demo, buying a song via iPhone that automatically appears on his iPAd as well.

11:49 am: iTunes in the cloud supports up to 10 devices.

11:50 am: Jobs: “We’ve added wireless backup to the cloud. Once daily, we’re gonna back up a lot of your important content to the cloud. If you ever get a new phone, everything will be loaded onto that phone automatically.”

Nice. All these new iCloud-based apps are free. “We want people to really see what this software can do, so we’re making it free,” says Jobs.

11:50 am: More from Jobs …

“So how do you get iCloud? When you buy an iOS device, you navigate to the iCloud screen, enter your ID and flick the switch.”

iCloud comes with 5GB storage–that doesn’t include photos or books.

When is it available? Today, says Jobs.

11:52 am: iTunes in the cloud is available today as an iTunes 4.3 beta.

11:52 am: “But there’s one more thing …”

11:53 am: “It’s a small thing and it pertains to iTunes in the cloud,” says Jobs. He continues, talking briefly about music that you may have purchased from non-iTunes sources.

Turns out there’s a way to get non-Itunes music into the iTunes cloud. It’s called iTunes Match. Apple scans and matches your library to its library of 18 million songs. And it upgrades it to 256 kbps AAC. Scanning should take a matter of minutes. Any music Apple doesn’t have in its library, it uploads from you. Cost: $24.99 a year.

11:56 am: Jobs notes that a comparative service from Amazon costs around $50 and requires an upload time of “weeks.”

11:57 am: “Now if you don’t think we’re serious about this, you’re wrong,” Jobs says, referring to a picture of the Maiden facility. This is our third data center and, as you can see, it’s rather large. Just to give you a feel for it’s size, see the dots on the roof? Those are people. And it’s full of stuff. Full of expensive stuff. … We are ready for our customers to start using iCloud and we are ready to put it into their hands.”

11:59 am: And that’s it. Thanks for joining us today.

Complete coverage:

Apple Preview: New Looks for the Mac, the iPhone and for iTunes

Ina Fried — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:42:02 +0000

Although the full details on Lion aren’t due to be spilled for another couple of hours, it is worth remembering that Apple has already given a preview of some of what to expect from the next version of Mac OS X.

Lion got its first mention at a “Back to the Mac” event last October. With Lion, due to arrive later this summer, Apple is trying to bring to the Mac several of the things popularized on the iPad, including full-screen apps, easy switching among programs and greater support for multi-touch gestures. It will also feature the Mac App Store built in, though Apple has already released this as an add-on. Other features, including auto-save and easier access to old versions of documents are detailed on Apple’s Web site.

Of course, the cat isn’t completely out of the bag. We still don’t know the full feature list, nor when to expect the software to arrive.

Less is known about iOS 5, the next version of the operating system that powers the iPad and iPhone, though that is also due to get a preview later this morning when CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage to kick off Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Popular rumors include improved notifications and perhaps greater Twitter integration.

Finally, Apple has also promised to talk about its iCloud service, which is expected to offer cloud-based music storage, among other features.

Of course, AllThingsD will have live coverage starting in just a bit, so keep it here for all the latest from WWDC.

Parallels Promotes Birger Steen, Former Microsoft VP, to CEO

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:29:15 +0000

Parallels, the virtualization software company known best for its desktop product that lets Mac owners run Windows on their machines, says it has promoted Birger Steen, its current president, to the position of CEO.

Serguei Beloussov, the company’s founder and outgoing CEO, will continue his full-time role as executive chairman of the board and chief architect.

Steen joined Parallels from Microsoft, where he was VP of Small and Medium Business and Distribution at Microsoft. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s business in Norway and in Russia.

Parallels is a privately held company that’s been around since 1999, that counts Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. By giving new Mac users an easy way to run Windows on their computers, it gave people accustomed to Windows, or who needed to continue to use a particular application on Windows, little excuse when the opportunity came to switch to the Mac.

But what I didn’t know is that Parallels is also a player a big player in selling software to service providers. It sells Plesk, a popular server automation tool, and it’s also a player in the server virtualization business.

I talked with Steen about all this last week.

NewEnteprise: Birger, I’m a Mac user and so of course I know about and even use Parallels once in awhile. But I had no idea Parallels was so closely involved with Web hosting and cloud providers. How big is that business?

Birger Steen: We’ve been working with service providers since 1999, and then over the last 10 years you’ll find companies like Rackspace and Media Temple and some of the biggest hosting providers are customers of ours. In most cases they run some version of our virtualization technology.

So when people think of virtualization of server, they think of VMWare. How are you different?

Partly it’s a different technology. Our technology virtualizes in a different way that’s uniquely suited to service providers that have large numbers of systems that they want to run with as much efficiency and density as possible. We have a market share of about 37 percent in that market.

And you also sell the Plesk control panel software for servers.

Control panels are very complementary to server virtualization. In the same way that control panels let you contol the computing resources on a desktop Windows machine or a Mac, you need to do the same thing on a server. If you were to rent the server from Rackspace or some other service provider, you need something to control it remotely and manage the resources. That’s the other business we’ve been in for about 10 years. As the hosting business became more complex, that product had to become more complex. A lot of our service providers sell servers to customers who then turn around and re-sell them to other end customers. So the control panel now manages resources at the reseller level, and the end-customer administrative level, and then at the end-customer user level. That’s become a very interesting business. It’s very fragmented with lots of companies reselling services from larger companies. Today we have something like 5,000 customers that are everyone from the smallest local hoster with a few servers, all the way up to some of the biggest telco companies in the world.

So what are your priorities this year?

We’re going to continue to drive hard on the Parallels desktop product, particularly on the Mac. It has a huge group of fans and we want to continue developing it. The first group of users were a lot of people who were devout Mac users where someone just had to use Windows or another OS some of the time. What we see now are a lot of users who are not switching to the Mac so much as they are adding Apple hardware. It’s a a market where people are using many different technologies and we want to continue to make that easy. We also want to continue to build out our international markets. We’re really strong in Germany, where we sell our product attached to 25 percent of the Macs sold there, whereas worldwide we’re hovering at about 5 to 6 percent. So there’s room for a lot of upside there.

So your business is profitable, and you’re growing fast. What kind of an exit do you anticipate for your investors? Will you take Parallels public?

We’re building the company to become a lot bigger, and to grow for a long period of time. We certainly aspire to have a both all the corporate processes and infrastructure that a public company would have. I’d ask our investors at Bessemer and Intel what they’re thinking. But I certainly have a long-term ambition for this.

Exclusive: Apple Taps Former Navy Information Warrior for Global Director of Security

Arik Hesseldahl — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 20:30:45 +0000

Apple has tapped security expert and author David Rice to be its director of global security, several sources have confirmed to me. He’s expected to start at Apple in March.

Apple hasn’t returned calls seeking comment.

There’s no word yet about what precisely Rice’s job will entail, and knowing secrecy-obsessed Apple, there likely won’t be. But it’s not hard to make a reasonable guess.

With iPhones and iPads penetrating the enterprise in ever more impressive numbers, companies want to know they’re secure.

Late last year Apple started working with Unisys to help it sell Apple products to corporations and government agencies, all of which are concerned about the security implications of iPhones and iPads running on their networks.

Those who know Rice describe him as a deeply respected name in IT security circles who not only can speak the kind of language that makes CIOs comfortable, but can also back up that language with the skills and knowledge to match.

Rice hasn’t yet responded to my messages seeking comment, but his bio is fascinating. He’s a 1994 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and has a master’s degree in Information Warfare and Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. He served as a Global Network Vulnerability analyst for the National Security Agency and as a Special Duty Cryptologic officer for the Navy.

His LinkedIn profile says he’s executive director of the Monterey Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm. He’s also on the faculty of IANS, an information security research company.

He also works with the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit organization that researches the potential for cyber attacks and their impact. Before that he worked for the security firm Neohapsis.

His 2007 book, “Geekonomics,” has been described as the software industry’s equivalent of Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed.” In it he argues that software is modern infrastructure–just like a bridge (hence, the picture on the cover)– and if it’s poorly made or insecure, it constitutes a public hazard.

Those who buy software–consumers, corporations and governments–end up being “crash test dummies” for an industry with no accountability for losses incurred by their customers, he argues.

He goes on to peg the costs of patching faulty software at $180 billion a year, and says that’s probably conservative. Patching software for security weaknesses takes capital that might be used for other, more productive, things.

His solution? Taxes. In a 2008 interview with Forbes, he compared security vulnerabilities in software to the unavoidable pollution emitted by factories. Since software can never be perfect, a “bug tax” keyed to the number and severity of software bugs discovered would create an incentive for better quality control.

Rice would be the latest in a string of high-profile security hires at Apple.

Last March, it hired Window Snyder, the former security chief at Mozilla, as its senior product manager for security, and in 2009 it hired Ivan Krsti?, the former head of security for the One Laptop Per Child project, to work on core security for Mac OS X. Jon Callas, the former CTO of encryption software maker PGP, now a unit of Symantec, joined Apple last year.