Apple claims Macs to be more secure than Windows PCs. In the light of recent malware attacks on the Mac platform, there are several articles on the Web questioning this claim. What is your take on this matter?

A:

Macs aren’t invulnerable to malicious software. No computer is. But the people who produce viruses and spyware have traditionally focused on Windows—and still do, primarily. There have indeed been a couple of recent instances of malware that spread among some Macs in the real world. But bear in mind that, despite the steady growth in Mac sales, Windows still powers the vast majority of the world’s PCs, and, because of that, there are hundreds of thousands of malicious programs targeting it, versus just a handful of known ones for the Mac.

So, my take on this is that while Mac users must be careful where they surf, and Apple will have to step up its game against these attacks, an unprotected Macintosh is still, in daily use, far less likely to become infected than an unprotected Windows PC. How users handle this depends on their habits and their tolerance, both for risk, and for the downsides of constantly running security software, which can sap resources and be annoying. I advise all Windows users to run such software. But I see it as optional for Mac users, at least today. Time will tell if that changes.

Q:

Do you know of any apps that work well with dictation on older iPhones?

A:

One that I have used successfully is Dragon Dictation from Nuance. The same company makes an Android app called FlexT9, which I haven’t tested, that includes dictation, among other features. Both apps work on a wide variety of models.

Q:

I love my BlackBerry for the ease of emailing and maintaining my schedule but not for accessing the Internet. I am a T-Mobile customer. Is there any device that has the good features of the BlackBerry and also easily and comprehensively accesses the Internet?

A:

T-Mobile offers a wide range of Android phones that include very good Web browsers and typically have two email apps: one for Gmail and one for all your other email accounts. They also have calendar apps.

Overall, I prefer these smartphones to current BlackBerrys and find the email experience fine. But people who are used to the BlackBerry for email—especially corporate email—sometimes complain that email on other devices isn’t as fast. This is partly because BlackBerry email is routed through a proprietary system. I’d advise asking friends or colleagues with newer T-Mobile Android phones about their email experience.

Write to Walt at mossberg.@wsj.com.

Six years ago this month, I revealed in Businessweek that Apple had incorporated in Nevada where the corporate tax rate is zero. So I found the Times’ account — written by Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, about the many financial tricks that Apple employs to minimize its tax exposure — to contain a lot of old news, but also some new, fascinating details. Who couldn’t love a phrase like “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich” to describe arcane accounting and legal tricks?

But the implication the story leaves a reader with — that Apple is somehow doing society a disservice by not paying its fair share of corporate taxes — is simply wrong on many levels. The most dubious of the lines that the Times attempts to draw is between Apple and the budget crisis at De Anza College, a Cupertino community college where Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was once a student. The college is facing a “death spiral” because of a decline in funding from the state. This funding, the reader is led to conclude, would be more plentiful if corporations like Apple were to step up and pay, and not escape the tax bill by setting up an office in neighboring Nevada.

What the Times fails to make clear is how community colleges are funded in California. The picture is much more complicated. California community colleges draw the majority of their funding from the state’s general fund — which is drawn directly from the state’s personal and corporate income taxes — and from local property taxes collected by counties. As of the 2009-2010 budget cycle, these two buckets made up about 88 percent of the system’s funding. State lottery funds, federal funds and student fees made up the remainder.

Tax policy wonks — which I’m not — will remember that California was the birthplace of the property tax revolt movement in the 1970s. In 1978, California voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that limits the amount by which property taxes can increase each year. Since then, at least one estimate pegs the amount that the state’s taxpayers have avoided paying at north of half a trillion dollars as of 2009. In February, the property tax shortfall facing the state community-college system was $41 million. Conclusion: If there is to be blame for the shortage of taxpayer funding at De Anza College, a healthy portion of it should be laid at the door of California’s own voters and taxpayers, who in 1978 thought that property-tax limitations were a good idea.

I had a few other problems with the story. Take sales taxes. When you buy a Mac in New York, you pay a sales tax of 8.875 percent. For a base-level iMac, priced at $1,199, that works out to more than $106 in taxes. While some states charge no sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon — the average sales tax in the U.S. works out to 9.6 percent.

Putting aside the fact that the average sales tax in Canada is higher, let’s assume that Apple’s North American sales of $38.3 billion in its fiscal 2011 were taxed at that rate, and do the math: We get $3.7 billion in sales taxes paid into the coffers of states and municipalities, except in those five states that have no such tax. That amounts to more than 1.5 times the $2.4 billion the Times says Apple would have owed the federal government. Factor in VAT and other similar taxes in the U.K. and throughout Europe, and you get the idea that Apple is generating tax revenue aplenty on the sale of its goods. Yes, those taxes are passed on to customers. But isn’t that the case with every tax a corporation making consumer products pays?

Finally, you may remember that earlier this year Apple released an extensive report on the number of jobs it had created and supported both through direct employment and in the orbit of the products it creates. It seemed an odd thing for Apple to release at the time, and now we know why: It reads almost like it was prepared by Apple in advance, knowing this story was in the pipeline at the Times. The final number, by its reckoning: 514,000 U.S. jobs are created by the Apple universe, including 47,000 employees; 210,000 jobs were created as part of the app economy, which didn’t even exist until 2008.

Assuming that each of those jobs pays a salary north of $35,350 a year, taxes collected on that income could range anywhere from 25 percent to 35 percent, depending on the income bracket. And that’s before accounting for any stock-based compensation.

At this point, the discussion turns to a deeper question: Is it better for society to have a company pay more in taxes, or to create more jobs? You can argue that had Apple not taken advantage of the various strategies it employed to pay less taxes, it might not have flourished as well as it has, and thus created fewer jobs. But people smarter than I will likely hash out the finer points of this argument in the coming days.

(Image is a screen grab from this silly Beatles cartoon built around the group’s song “Taxman.”)

Apple has beaten Wall Street’s consensus estimates in 16 out of its last 17 quarters. Today it beat them once again.

Reporting second-quarter earnings after market close Tuesday, Apple obliterated recent worries that have dragged down its stock price over the past few weeks.

The company posted net income of $11.6 billion on revenue of $39.19 billion. Earnings per share were $12.30, far more than the $10.06 per share analysts had been expecting.

Apple said it sold 35.1 million iPhones for the quarter, up more than 88 percent from the year prior; 11.8 million iPads, up 151 percent; 4 million Macs, up 7 percent; and nearly 7.7 million iPods, down 15 percent. Big numbers — all of them. And save for lower than expected iPad sales, they beat estimates.

Analysts had expected Apple to report second-quarter earnings of $10.06 per share on revenue of $36.8 billion. And, on average, they had called for iPhone shipments of 31 to 32 million — 32 being the whisper number — iPad shipments of about 13 million and Mac shipments of around 4.4 million.

“We’re thrilled with sales of over 35 million iPhones and almost 12 million iPads in the March quarter,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “The new iPad is off to a great start, and across the year you’re going to see a lot more of the kind of innovation that only Apple can deliver.”

Guidance for the June quarter is a bit lower than expected with EPS of $8.68 on $34 billion in revenue as opposed to the $9.92 on $37.4 billion expected by analysts, but Apple’s guidance is typically comically low.

Apple shares, which closed down 2 percent at $560.28 ahead of earnings, have since spiked well over 7 percent to $602.

Notes from the earnings call

• Apple currently has $110 billion in cash, short-term and long-term securities. About $74 billion of that is held offshore.
• Expect Mountain Lion to ship in late summer.
• IPhone sales in the Asia Pacific doubled. The device is currently available in over 100 countries on 230 carriers.
• IPad channel inventory was about 2 million at the end of the quarter, which is below the company’s target range of 4-6 weeks of iPad inventory.
• 360 million cumulative iOS device sales.
• App Store has 600,000 apps, 200,000 of them specifically for iPad.
• Retail store revenues jumped 38 percent from last year’s first quarter to $4.4 billion.
• “The new iPad is on fire. We’re selling them as fast as we can make them.”
• This is the 24th straight quarter that the Mac has outgrown the broader market.
• Tim Cook says the lower-priced iPad 2 appears to have unlocked some education demand, but adds that it’s a bit early to make any big conclusions about the lower price change.
• Cook: “Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million. …It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years to sell that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”
• Cook:”But I’d also point out that the new iPad was supply constrained last quarter for the full three weeks or so that it was shipping and is actually still constrained.”
• Cook on tablet-laptop hybrids: “anything can be forced to converge, but the problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and there’s a danger of making tradeoffs to the point where what you have left doesn’t please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not gonna be pleasing to the user.”
• Cook on iPhone subsidies: The size of the subsidy is not large compared to the sum of monthly payments customers make to carriers over the span of their contract. … Churn from iPhone users is the lowest of any phones in their portfolio and that’s obviously a significant benefit to the carrier. … iPhone is the best smartphone on the planet to entice a customer who is currently using a traditional mobile phone to upgrade to a smartphone.
• Cook on Qualcomm shortages: That’s a tough question to answer. We’re aware of the issue. But we don’t use 28 nanometer parts currently and we don’t comment on future products.
• Cook on patent litigation: “I’ve always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it. If we could get to a fair settlement, I’d prefer that to a battle. … We just want people to invent their own stuff. It’s very important that Apple not become the developer for the world.”

RELATED POSTS:

• Contracts With Apple Should Blunt Any Carrier Pushback on iPhone Subsidies
• Apple’s Earnings Should Ease Any Investor Worries
• Investors Cut Another Slice out of Apple
• iPhone 5 Will Spike Apple Shares, and You Know It
• Goldman Sachs: This Is the Beginning of a Big Year for Apple
• March Quarter Mac Sales Could Miss (Not That It Really Matters)
• Analyst Cuts Apple Rating on Prospect of iPhone Subsidy Revolt

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120424/and-the-beats-go-on-apple-crushes-estimates-again/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120423/apples-earnings-should-ease-any-investor-worries/ http://allthingsd.com/20120423/apples-earnings-should-ease-any-investor-worries/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:00:08 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=198621 If Apple is prepping to post another quarter of blowout financials when it reports earnings on Tuesday, you certainly wouldn’t know it from the company’s recent stock performance. Last Friday, Apple shares slipped into correction, falling as low as $572 apiece — down more than 10 percent from the all-time high of $644 they had reached just 10 days prior.

Is this simply a buying opportunity ahead of another monster quarter?

That seems to be the consensus among the majority of analysts following the company, who expect big things from Apple come Tuesday. As of Saturday, the Street’s consensus estimate was for earnings of $10 per share on sales of $36.63 billion.

And despite whatever concerns have been addling investors the past week or so, it’s highly unlikely that Apple is going to miss those numbers. With the iPhone 4S selling well and demand for the new iPad running high, a soft quarter just isn’t in the cards. If there is an area of weakness, it will likely be in Macs, where sales might be softer than usual in anticipation of an expected refresh of the line this summer.

But beyond that? Probably not much to worry about, and we can likely anticipate another strong quarter.

“Based on our supply chain checks, we anticipate a sizeable EPS beat based on iPhone and iPad strength despite Macs likely coming in a little light,” said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. “We believe concerns over slowing iPhone and iPad momentum are overdone and are buyers on recent share weakness.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120423/apples-earnings-should-ease-any-investor-worries/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120418/goldman-sachs-this-is-the-beginning-of-a-big-year-for-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20120418/goldman-sachs-this-is-the-beginning-of-a-big-year-for-apple/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:39:08 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=197823 Apple’s recent Wall Street losing streak over the past week didn’t shake Goldman Sachs’ faith in the company in the slightest. Indeed, in a note to clients this morning, analyst Bill Shope reiterated his “buy” rating on Apple and boosted his 12-month price target on the stock to $750 from $700, arguing that this is “the beginning of a very big year” for the company.

According to Shope, recent investor concerns that have weighed on Apple shares — soft Mac sales, the prospect of an iPhone subsidy revolt among carriers — are overblown and will be proven wrong when the company reports earnings next week.

“We expect solid March quarter upside, which is likely to trigger healthy increases in iPhone, iPad and overall earnings expectations for the full year,” Shope wrote. “In addition, we believe recent investor concerns over a ‘catalyst-light’ June quarter are misguided, since this will be the first full quarter with a refreshed iPad, a lower-priced iPad 2, and a fully ramped iPhone distribution channel; in other words, the June quarter is when many of the recent catalysts begin to fully manifest into earnings power.”

And with that, he raised estimates for Apple’s second quarter to $36.9 billion and $10.18 per share, ahead of current consensus, which is about $36.67 billion and $9.98.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120418/goldman-sachs-this-is-the-beginning-of-a-big-year-for-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120417/march-quarter-mac-sales-could-miss-not-that-it-really-matters/ http://allthingsd.com/20120417/march-quarter-mac-sales-could-miss-not-that-it-really-matters/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:01:25 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=197036 The latest U.S. Mac sales data from NPD is in, and it’s not nearly as favorable to Apple as it has been in the past. In fact, the numbers are soft enough that some observers feel the company’s first-quarter Mac sales may fall short of expectations when it reports earnings next week.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reports that NPD’s data, which counts only U.S. sales, implies that Mac sales for the March quarter ended down 5 percent year over year. And if that proves to be the case, Apple could potentially miss its Mac number when it posts financials next Tuesday. Caveat: Last quarter, Apple beat NPD data by 14 percentage points — something to keep in mind while mulling Munster’s assertion.

Anyway … the Street is looking for worldwide Mac sales of 4.5 million; Munster figures Apple likely sold less than that — somewhere between 4.1 million to 4.4 million, with sales slowed by a core MacBook Pro and iMac lineup that hasn’t been refreshed in more than a year. Those two product lines alone likely account for about 50 percent of Mac sales, so it’s certainly conceivable that diminishing consumer interest in them might affect Apple’s sales numbers.

But is this really anything to worry about?

Munster himself acknowledges that strong iPhone and iPad sales will more than offset any Mac softness. He still expects the company to beat consensus EPS and revenue estimates and, like many Apple watchers, he sees new Macs headed into the pipeline soon, following on the heels of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors. Said Munster, “We believe that MacBook, iMac, and potentially MacBook Air, lines could all be refreshed during the June quarter, which we believe would result in a reacceleration of Mac sales.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120417/march-quarter-mac-sales-could-miss-not-that-it-really-matters/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120416/seven-questions-for-steve-felice-chief-commercial-officer-of-dell/ http://allthingsd.com/20120416/seven-questions-for-steve-felice-chief-commercial-officer-of-dell/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:44:32 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=196695 Dell feels like the company that people used to fear but don’t anymore. There was a time, in the late 1990s and the early part of the last decade, when its competitors feared “the Dell effect”: The relentless driving down of selling prices on PCs and servers that made it difficult to compete.

We all know how that turned out. Dell first conquered the PC market, and the ultracompetitive environment it created drove several companies out of the market: IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo; Gateway sold itself to Acer; Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq. Other lesser players are all but forgotten.

It’s as if Dell was a victim of the hyperefficient world it created. HP is now the world’s biggest PC maker, followed by China’s Lenovo, with Dell in third place on a global basis, as of last quarter.

PCs — consumer and business PCs — still amount to about half of Dell’s business. But there’s another way to look at Dell, and that’s from the point of view of its enterprise business. I learned this in a recent conversation with Steve Felice, Dell’s chief commercial officer. I also learned that the consumer PC business, for which Dell is still widely known in the U.S., amounts to about one-fifth of its business, while its enterprise lines of business, including commercial PCs, amount to 50 percent.

It’s all part of the long-term transformation that has been underway at Dell for a few years now. The company recently did three acquisitions in as many days, the most significant of which was for Wyse Technology.

That caught my attention. But first I wanted Felice’s reaction to the findings of a J.P. Morgan survey of 100 CIOs, saying that the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8 wouldn’t be much of a catalyst for PC buying at large companies.

(We had a pretty good talk, so, arbitrarily, I left in an eighth question from our exchange.)

AllThingsD: Steve, there’s a survey out from J.P. Morgan recently that says that CIOs from large companies don’t see Windows 8 as the sort of thing that would get them buying PCs again. That, to me, could be interpreted as bad news for Dell. Is it?

Felice: I don’t think so. Operating system changes have never been a catalyst, at least not in the corporate world. Consumers and small businesses take off with it right away. Corporations have rollout schedules, and they stick to them. Some of them are just starting to deploy Windows 7. They do their three-year roll-out schedules, and when it’s time they’ll go to Windows 8. About 55 percent of our business are the larger mid-sized and up public companies. The other 45 percent are small businesses and consumer. We’ll see some buying within that 45 percent. On the others, they will go on their normal schedule.

On the enterprise side, I was just with a bunch of CIOs here, and there are some very common themes about why I think they are going to spend some money. And it’s really to continue a transformation of their own infrastructure, to take advantage of virtualization and cloud computing and bigger pipes to transport information. There is a pretty common theme that there is more opportunity to get more out of assets. There is more optimism around moving away from legacy architectures and into open systems. The whole concept of being more “open to open” is there. We view that as good, because we’re the pure play when it comes to moving to open architectures.

What are the CIOs you talk to worried about these days?

Security. It’s easily in the top three concerns. We think we added to our portfolio two of the best assets out there. One is intended to tell you how to figure out what’s going on in their world. That’s what SecureWorks, a company we acquired recently, does. It analyzes your infrastructure and tells you where your threats are coming from and how to prevent them. And then we just announced the acquisition of SonicWall. They built a nice unified threat-management platform. From my viewpoint, it helps enable the movement to open. Some people are afraid to leave the proprietary world because they think it’s more secure.

Where are you on mobile? I read that you just killed a smartphone model. Where is Dell going on the mobile front?

I would characterize the last couple of years as us experimenting with what form factors and operating environments will work. The good thing is that we’ve never overextended ourselves in mobile, yet we’ve launched a lot of products, and we’ve learned a lot from them. We’ve launched tablets — 5-inch, 7-inch, 10-inch. We’ve launched them in emerging markets first, we’ve launched them in developed markets first. We’ve launched smartphones around the world. So we have an active smartphone that we just launched in China, and one in Japan. We just end-of-lifed one in the U.S., which is what I think you’re referring to. We have a road map of other products that are coming up. We are predominantly a commercial-oriented business that has some consumer business, but the lines are blurring.

What we’ve learned is to look at the consumer from the commercial side, not the other way around. Some companies who have done well in mobility are all about consumers and entertainment. And looking at the consumer as an individual, without any regard to how they might interact on the professional side of their life. Executives of any company I talk to say these devices are driving them crazy. They don’t know what’s happening to their information, how they get it back, nor how to interact with the other devices that people are bringing into the workplace. Or how to support them and control them. No one is dealing with that. So, generally, you’re going to see Dell think more broadly about the mobile ecosystem. When you next see devices from Dell, you’ll see us thinking more about the security of them, the end-to-end aspects of managing them, from the data center to the end user.

And yet what I’m hearing from a lot of companies is that they’re just adopting iPads, mainly because the bosses have them and love them. This is how Apple is penetrating the enterprise. How is Dell going to compete with that?

It’s unique, no question. And so it’s got some infatuation aspects to it. But then I talk to these customers, and because there isn’t a lot of alternatives, what they’re tolerating is pretty interesting. They say they have one of those products. Then the problems start coming out. First, the office applications don’t work very well, and they have trouble reading PowerPoint decks. And then they can’t wirelessly print easily, and some days they’re not able to get on the network at the office. And I look at that and say, they’re tolerating a lot because they like the form factor. Our conclusion is that there need to be some alternatives.

We’ve got the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, and we take it around and show it to customers, and invariably the decision-maker wants one. And then he says that if he had this, he never would have bothered with the tablet. So we took a consumer-oriented product and put pro support on it, and showed that to CIOs and said that if their executive team used it, they’d get the same support as they would on their Latitude product. So when it breaks, someone will come to the office and fix it, and you don’t have to go stand in line at the Apple store. Then we put image management on it. If you want a corporate image that has to be managed, we’ll do that. Institutions want thin and light devices, but they also want the options to secure and support them. The other thing that is happening, with ARM, you’ll get even more form factors.

Well, let’s talk about the PC, then. People keep talking about the decline of the PC. The research houses keep predicting market declines, and sometimes they materialize and sometimes they don’t. But even so, the numbers — at least globally — are flat to slightly up. Yet when you drill down to different regions, you see very different stories, with different countries growing like crazy. How does Dell see this right now?

This is a weighted math problem. The lowest growth rates are in the developed world, which will remain more of a replacement cycle world. The U.S. is like that because PC penetration is very high. Then you go to India and China, where it’s very low. What’s happening is that the emerging markets, where combined, they will be bigger than the developed world. And they are still growing rapidly, so the math is going to reverse itself. You’ll still see low-single-digit growth rates in the developed world, but healthy growth rates in emerging markets — but the emerging markets will be bigger. We still see double-digit growth in China. Look at Indonesia, there’s 300 million people just starting to buy PCs. As these countries industrialize and get more mature, they just need basic computing.

And how do those markets develop?

It comes back to the first thing I talked about. These countries don’t have the legacy baggage. They’ll grow, they’ll industrialize, they’ll need more infrastructure. And what will they buy? They’ll buy standard servers, storage, and open systems. This is happening in China, and its why we’re No. 1 in servers there.

Do you think people still associate Dell with the PC and don’t give it enough credit for its greater focus on the enterprise?

I’d have to say yes. Some of that is our own doing. We have this very large direct model, and we have a tendency to talk to customers one on one. So we tend not to do a lot of brand advertising. So our consumer advertising is more visible. If you ask people randomly what portion of our business is consumer, they’d say it’s more than half, but in fact it’s only about 20 percent. And if you ask people what portion of our business is servers and storage, they don’t know, but it’s more than 50 percent.

If you combine consumer and commercial PCs, how much is that?

About half is PC, and that’s global. But I think with all the acquisitions we’ve done, and a lot more customer testimonials we’re doing, the perception is changing. We’ve done some targeted testing of campaigns where we say, ‘Do you know that Dell does this?’ The perception of Dell as an enterprise provider skyrocketed. Brazil is an interesting case, because we entered the server and storage market there before the PC market. That’s because the only way to really be successful in Brazil with PCs is to have your own manufacturing there, because of the stiff tariffs. So in Brazil, Dell is thought of as an enterprise company. You’ll see more of a commitment this year to do more brand-oriented advertising around the enterprise.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/seven-questions-for-steve-felice-chief-commercial-officer-of-dell/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/apple-fights-back-against-malware-attack/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/apple-fights-back-against-malware-attack/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 01:02:51 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=195097 Apple just posted a Knowledge Base article on the the Flashback malware incident that has been the subject of so much discussion since it was revealed to have created a a 600,000-Mac-strong botnet last week.

By my scorecard, the article amounts to the first public comment Apple has made on the subject, period. And it’s very interesting indeed, especially in light of all the flak the company had been taking over what appeared, to some eyes, to have been an inadequate response.

First and foremost, Apple says, it is working on software to detect and remove the malware from an infected machine. Secondly, the company says it is working with Internet service providers around the world to disable the servers that are being used as the “command and control” network that’s basically telling compromised machines what to do.

Apparently it’s this effort that has caused trouble for the security outfit Dr. Web, which originally discovered the vulnerability in the first place: In working on shutting down the C&C servers, Apple apparently got servers that Dr. Web had used to track the spread of the outbreak shut down as well, according to this report on Forbes.com.

The vulnerability that allowed the malware to get through in the first place wasn’t in Apple’s Mac OS X itself, but in Oracle’s Java. Apple agrees with me at least with regard to machines running older versions of Mac OS: Disable it.

Anyway, here’s Apple’s article, in its entirety:

About Flashback malware
Summary

A recent version of malicious software called Flashback exploits a security flaw in Java in order to install itself on Macs.

Products Affected

Java, Mac OS X 10.6, OS X Lion

A recent version of malicious software called Flashback exploits a security flaw in Java in order to install itself on Macs.

Apple released a Java update on April 3, 2012 that fixes the Java security flaw for systems running OS X v10.7 and Mac OS X v10.6. By default, your Mac automatically checks for software updates every week, but you can change that setting in Software Update preferences. You can also run Software Update at any time to manually check for the latest updates.

Apple is developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware.

In addition to the Java vulnerability, the Flashback malware relies on computer servers hosted by the malware authors to perform many of its critical functions. Apple is working with ISPs worldwide to disable this command and control network.

Additional Information

For Macs running Mac OS X v10.5 or earlier, you can better protect yourself from this malware by disabling Java in your web browser(s) preferences.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/apple-fights-back-against-malware-attack/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/how-to-find-out-if-your-mac-is-in-the-infected-1-percent/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/how-to-find-out-if-your-mac-is-in-the-infected-1-percent/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 19:59:09 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=194947 The chatter in computer security circles last week and over the weekend was about the Mac. A weakness in Oracle’s Java has led to the infection of some 600,000 Macs with malware, creating the first known Botnet comprised of machines on that platform.

Naturally, Windows apologists, sick of being the target of a decade of malware-based ridicule, were quick to jump up and down and scream that the Mac’s newfound market success has made it the next natural target for malware creators.

One thing that has been lacking of yet is a course of action for the 1 percent of Macs in use that have been hit with the malware. Kaspersky Labs, which did a thorough analysis of the malware today launched a Web-based tool to determine if your Mac is among those known to have contracted it.

The tool checks the Mac’s UUID number against a database of machines known to be affected and tells you if you have it, and if you don’t know what a UUID number is, it shows you how to find it.

If your machine turns out to be among the anointed 1 percent who some say are the harbingers of a new apocalyptic phase for Mac security, there is a removal tool.

So now that we’re nearing the end of this kerfuffle, what can we glean from this incident on the state of Mac security? First off, it’s necessary, as always, to include a hedging statement. In the investing world we often hear the phrase “Past performance is not an indication of future results.” It means that unknown, unforseen circumstances can always bring about a substantial variation in a known and established pattern.

On the subject of security the pattern has been this: Occasionally, a vulnerability, sometimes nothing more than a proof of concept, sometimes something a little more threatening, such as this Flashback malware or the MacDefender one that occurred last year, appears and re-opens the discussion. After years of marginal market share, the Mac now represents a juicy new target for malware creators, and Mac users are in for a rude awakening.

Indeed, various pundits have been saying that some onset of significant serious trouble for Mac owners is just over the horizon. This indeed could happen. A new supervirus could emerge tomorrow that causes all kinds of unforseen troubles. But it hasn’t yet.

Windows still remains a target. As recently as 11 months ago, Microsoft’s own data showed that of the 420,000 Windows users who downloaded a then-new malware removal tool, those who had infections averaged 3.5 threats per machine. And of the top 10 threats seen at that time, seven were the result of vulnerabilities in Java, something you should probably consider turning off, whether your computer runs Windows or Mac OS.

As of today, for those 600,000 people whose Macs are infected, they’re averaging only one threat per machine.

One is still too many, especially if it’s a bad one. And clearly Apple can’t act like it’s impervious to security concerns, yet there’s no evidence that it is. Just slow. Some critics have said Apple didn’t respond quickly enough to this latest outbreak, especially in light of the fact that Flashback/Flashfake took advantage of a Java vulnerability that has been known for about a month. Apple clearly could have and should have responded faster.

Apple last year hired David Rice, a former U.S. Navy Information warrior, so it has at the top of its security team a well-respected executive with a history of thought leadership on the subject.

The current state and future of Mac security will be a topic I hope AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg ask Apple CEO Tim Cook about on the stage at D:10 next month. One hopes he’ll give us some visibility into the urgency or lack thereof with which Apple views the evolving threat landscape.

But if this is the worst that the malware creators can dish out, I still like my chances on the Mac. The apocalypse isn’t here yet.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/how-to-find-out-if-your-mac-is-in-the-infected-1-percent/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/get-off-of-my-cloud-found-makes-personal-files-searchable-on-the-desktop/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/get-off-of-my-cloud-found-makes-personal-files-searchable-on-the-desktop/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:00:03 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=192198 We users give our personal data and files to cloud services like Dropbox and Google Docs so they can reliably store them and help us access them from anywhere.

But maybe some of us want the inverse, too: Found is a new Mac desktop application that pulls down users’ cloud files to store them locally. The point is to be able to search all your personal files, no matter the service or folder they live in.

For now, Found only connects to Dropbox, Google Docs and Gmail, and local files on a single machine. When a computer with Found installed is online, the app is constantly retrieving and backing up the latest emails and docs. As compared to alternatives like Greplin, Found doesn’t index users’ files on its own servers.

Though Found is an unfashionable desktop app, it’s been built to be conveniently accessed either via an icon in the Mac’s top bar or by tapping the “control” button twice. Unlike Apple’s built-in Spotlight search, Found displays nice full text and big image previews.

Obviously, the big play for Found would be if it worked on every device, connected between a user’s multiple devices, and connected to every cloud service. All those are daunting tasks — just consider trying to back up all your files to your tiny phone storage. There’s a reason people use the cloud.

San Francisco-based Found was started by two former Microsoft corporate strategy guys who have a team of five people total and $1 million in seed funding from NEA and Rembrandt Ventures. They plan to make Found available to the public in May, but said people who sign up now should get early access.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/get-off-of-my-cloud-found-makes-personal-files-searchable-on-the-desktop/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120306/big-fish-scoops-up-mobile-casino-game-maker-self-aware-games/ http://allthingsd.com/20120306/big-fish-scoops-up-mobile-casino-game-maker-self-aware-games/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:02:02 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=180885 Casual-gaming company Big Fish has acquired mobile social game developer Self Aware Games, makers of Card Ave: Casino, and its parent company, Social Concepts, in a cash-equity deal of an undisclosed amount. The acquisition comes as more gaming companies are exploring opportunities in gambling-themed games and U.S. states weigh the legalization of Internet gambling. Seattle-based Big Fish, which has more than 2,500 games in its catalog and 45 million game downloads per month, saw revenue north of $180 million in 2011, the company said.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120306/big-fish-scoops-up-mobile-casino-game-maker-self-aware-games/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120216/apples-mountain-lion-and-microsofts-windows-8-both-aim-to-make-desktop-more-like-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20120216/apples-mountain-lion-and-microsofts-windows-8-both-aim-to-make-desktop-more-like-mobile/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:16:24 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=175400 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120216/apples-mountain-lion-and-microsofts-windows-8-both-aim-to-make-desktop-more-like-mobile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120216/meet-mountain-lion-the-latest-mac-os/ http://allthingsd.com/20120216/meet-mountain-lion-the-latest-mac-os/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:33:30 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=175244 Apple today took the wraps off a preview version of the next version of its Mac operating system software. Its name is Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and it will be available this summer.

Among the headline features are deep integration with Apple’s iCloud service, and with Twitter. And several features from iOS devices, like Messages and Reminder, are making their debut on the Mac, and will create a more unified experience among Macs, iPads and iPhones.

The release, which is coming only a year after Lion debuted last summer, might just indicate a speeding up of the cadence at which Apple does Mac software upgrades. Usually there’s an interval of 18 months to 24 months between major OS upgrades. That makes this announcement a bit of a surprise. Does that mean we can expect another one about 18 months from now? We’ll see.

Here’s a quick rundown of the 10 new features:

iCloud built in: Mountain Lion will be the first version of OS X built with iCloud fully integrated. Documents in the Cloud is a new feature that will allow documents you create and edit on the Mac to sync up and readily be available on iPhones and iPads. Changes you make in the document on one device will automatically appear on the other. You’ll be able to use iCloud from the moment you start up your Mac and sign in with an Apple ID.

Messages: It’s crazy to think about it, but iMessage users on the iPhone and iPad have sent something like 26 billion messages in only the few months it has been available. Messages is the new instant messaging application that will replace iChat. It will unify the experience between the Mac and iOS devices, and will still be compatible with services like Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Jabber, but will also bring iMessages into the Mac. Conversations stay up to date across all devices. It supports photos and videos. Also? There’s a FaceTime button.

Twitter: Twitter is also deeply integrated into Mountain Lion. You’ll be able to tweet directly from within several applications, sharing Web site addresses, photos and videos. Central to this is something Apple calls the Tweet Sheet, which you call up from the Share menu. It grabs what you want to share on Twitter and you write your tweet from directly within the Mac OS. And as cool as this is, it’s notable also for what it’s not: Facebook integration. Expect lots of speculation around that.

Share Sheets: Sharing is kind of a big deal these days, so it makes sense that the ability to do it — whether on Twitter or via email or any one of the cloud services out there — would be available on the Mac. There’s a new Share button in Safari and in other applications that makes it easy to send a photo to a friend via email or to Flickr, or a video to Vimeo or to another computer via AirDrop.

Notification Center: The dashboard of notices saying what’s going on in iOS is coming to the Mac. Similar to how you reach it on the iPhone — a swipe down along the length of the screen — it will appear on the Mac with a two-finger swipe from the right edge of the trackpad, and the list will appear on the right side of the screen. When you get a notification from an application — say, an email has arrived, or a download is finished, or a calendar reminder is going off — you can see them all in one place. Also, short messages with notifications appear in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and then fade away after a few seconds. It reminds me a great deal of a third-party application enhancer I use, called Growl.

Reminders: Another popular iOS app is being added to the Mac. Your to-do list remains synced across the Mac, iPhone and iPad, and you can add reminders that pop up throughout the day, so you don’t forget.

Notes: The all-purpose “take this down for later” application gets the Mac treatment. Soon you’ll be able to drag URLs into a note. And thanks to iCloud, they’ll be synced across Mac, iPhone and iPad. You’ll also be able to “pin” a note to your desktop, meaning it will stay open even if you close the main Notes application. Notes also has a Share button.



Game Center: Long a weakness on the Mac, gaming is getting stronger all the time. Games, it turns out, are the most popular software titles on the Mac App store. So it makes sense to bring the Game Center experience from iOS to the Mac. I saw a quick demo, where two people played a racing game against each other — can’t remember which game exactly — one was on the iPad, the other on the Mac. You’ll be able to challenge friends, keep track of your standings on a leaderboard and see what games your friends like. There’s also support for in-game voice chat, so you can talk trash.

Gatekeeper: Expect this feature to be controversial among Mac software developers. Basically, it’s an attempt by Apple to deal with the fact that the one serious security threat it faces is software that looks good at first but turns out to behave badly only after you’ve downloaded and installed it. The new scheme basically sets up a three-tier system, where the user can decide from where they will be allowed to download and install new software. In the most restrictive — or some will argue safest — case, you can set your Mac to allow only software from the Mac App store. As it does with the App Store on iOS devices, Apple vets the software sold there for safety. In the second case — this one not as restrictive — you can install software from sources other than the App Store, but only from developers who have signed up as a known developer. Here, Apple will not have checked the app for safety, but will at least vouch that the developer is known. Developers will have the option of signing up for a Developer ID. This is the part that I think they’ll find a little controversial. Anyway, in the third case, there are no restrictions. You can install software from any developer and any source, much as you can do today.



AirPlay Mirroring: If you have an Apple TV handy, you’ll be able to use your TV as a screen for your Mac — it’s super easy. If they’re on the same wireless network, the Mac will have a simple pulldown menu that makes your TV mirror what’s on the Mac.

Finally, Apple added a lot of new features for the Chinese market. Text input has been improved, and several popular Web services — like Baidu for search, integration with Sina Weibo for Twitter-like sharing and video-sharing with Youku and Tudou — have been built in, in order to make the Mac OS experience a lot more China-friendly than it has been before. Given the Apple madness that has struck that country in recent months, it will certainly find a happy audience.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120216/meet-mountain-lion-the-latest-mac-os/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120214/for-backup-youve-got-a-friend-family-or-cloud/ http://allthingsd.com/20120214/for-backup-youve-got-a-friend-family-or-cloud/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:05:55 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=174662 Nothing elicits such a strong case of technology guilt as asking other people if they back up their computers. Eyes dart toward the ground. Excuses are made. The subject is quickly changed.

As many people know or quickly find out, backing up a computer can be a painfully slow process. This week, I tested a computer-backup system that requires minimal effort and works in the background to automatically back up files: CrashPlan. This appropriately named program is made by Code 42 Software, a Minneapolis-based company.

CrashPlan works with all types of operating systems and lets users back up to remote servers in the cloud and/or other computers or hard drives, like another PC they own or one belonging to a good friend or family member (as long as they give permission). The system also sets no restrictions on file size.

On a typical home Internet connection, the backup process to a CrashPlan remote server could take several days or even weeks for a first-time backup. (After that, backups are much faster and happen unnoticed.) The first-time backup for one of my laptops with about 46 gigabytes of data had been running almost continuously for three days when I filed this column on Tuesday. After the initial backup, regular backups won’t take nearly as long. CrashPlan has a mobile app that works on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Android and Windows Phone 7, allowing remote access to backed-up files.

The free version of CrashPlan enables a daily backup to other computers and hard drives but not to Code 42’s remote servers. The subscription-based CrashPlan+ will back up to the remote servers as well as other computers or hard drives. It can back up as often as once a minute and lets users choose what data to back up where.



CrashPlan’s straightforward user interface clearly shows what your data are doing and where they are being stored.

CrashPlan+ comes in three payment plans, each with its own tiered rates — from a month-to-month option to a four-year subscription. For each of the three plans, the four-year subscription is the least expensive at $70, or about $1.50 a month per computer for up to 10 gigabytes of data; $140 or $3 monthly per computer for unlimited storage; and $288 or $6 monthly for up to 10 computers and unlimited storage. The company offers a free 30-day trial.

I got started by downloading the software to my MacBook, creating an account and starting the initial backup. A scan of my data took a few minutes before the actual backup began. Using my Verizon DSL connection over Wi-Fi, the estimates of how long it would take changed dramatically by the second. I saw estimates of as much as 17.5 days and as little as 6.6 hours.

I also downloaded CrashPlan onto my office Windows PC, which has a fast, hard-wired Ethernet connection. I logged into my account and opted to back up a folder of photos that was roughly 16 gigabytes. The estimate for this backup was a little over one day, though I didn’t adjust CrashPlan settings to get the fastest transfer on this PC. In a simple menu, I could opt to back up the Windows PC to my MacBook as well as to remote servers — or just to the MacBook alone. On my MacBook, I made sure to adjust the settings to get the fastest speed possible for my giant backup.

Code 42 CEO Matthew Dornquast said the worst-case scenario speeds are initially displayed, but that these adjust down as time goes on. In my experience, the initial estimates didn’t change much.

CrashPlan backs up your newest files first on the assumption those mean the most to you, and it encrypts all files, so file names can’t be read on remote servers or backup computers. I liked CrashPlan’s straightforward user interface because it clearly showed me what my data were doing and where it was being stored. A section labeled “Destinations” let me choose where data was backed up and options included “CrashPlan Central” (remote servers), “Friend,” “Another Computer” or “Folder.” A section labeled “Files” showed exactly what was being stored; in my case, this meant 285,930 files. An “Inbound” section showed any computers that were using my computer for backup.



A CrashPlan mobile app is available on a Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android phone.

In settings, users can opt to be emailed or even sent direct messages via Twitter that tell them the latest backup status. This is helpful if you’re only backing up to, say, one other PC in your house and that PC fails to back up.

In addition to over-the-air backups, CrashPlan users with a lot of data, very little patience or both may want to try an alternate option. For $125 (including shipping both ways) and a monthly fee for remote storage, the company will send a one-terabyte hard drive that can be loaded with data and mailed back. Once that huge block of data is initially stored on remote servers, regular backups won’t take nearly as long.

To get data back, a “Restore to Your Door” feature will send you a hard drive filled with your data so you can load it onto a new computer. This also costs $125 (with shipping both ways) and the monthly cost of remote storage.

Compared with competitors, CrashPlan fares well. For example, CrashPlan doesn’t limit upload or download speeds, while Carbonite limits upload speeds for large amounts of data after a certain amount has been backed up, further slowing the process. Mozy supports external drives, but this backup is deleted if the drive is disconnected or turned off for more than 30 days. CrashPlan keeps the backup indefinitely, waiting for the drive to be reconnected.

Email katie.boehret@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120214/for-backup-youve-got-a-friend-family-or-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120214/apple-ceo-cook-reiterates-commitment-to-workers-welfare/ http://allthingsd.com/20120214/apple-ceo-cook-reiterates-commitment-to-workers-welfare/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:05:29 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=174489 Apple CEO Tim Cook made a rare appearance at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference Tuesday and he couldn’t have picked a better time for his first big investor event since the death of Steve Jobs.

Apple is on a tear after a monster quarter, the best in its 35-year history, and many believe it’s headed into one of its strongest product cycles ever, a stretch that will see a next-generation iPad in March, and a new iPhone and long-rumored Apple Television before the end of the year.

But it was a more troubling topic that he wanted to address first: Concerns about working conditions at its suppliers.

“The first thing that I want everyone to know — Apple takes working conditions very, very seriously,” he said. “And we have for a very long time. We care about every worker. I’ve spent a lot of time in factories personally and not just as an executive. I worked at a paper mill in Alabama and an aluminum plant in Virginia. So we are closely connected to the production process and we understand these manufacturing issues on a very granular level. We believe that every worker has a right to a fair and safe work environment … and Apple’s manufacturing partners must live up to this to do business with us.”

“No one in our industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple,” he continued. “We are constantly auditing facilities, going deep into the supply chain, looking for problems, finding problems, and more importantly fixing them. And we report everything because we believe that transparency is so very important in this area. I am so incredibly proud of the work our teams are doing in this area. They focus on the most difficult problems, and they stay with them until they fix them. They are truly a model for the industry.

“We think that the use of underage labor is abhorrent — it’s extremely rare in our supply chain, but our top priority is to eliminate it. If we find a supplier that intentionally hires underage labor, that’s a firing offense.”

“As you may have read,” Cook said, “the Fair Labor Association is doing an audit of our manufacturing partners. This audit is the most detailed in history of mass manufacturing in scale, scope and transparency, and I am looking forward to the results.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120214/apple-ceo-cook-reiterates-commitment-to-workers-welfare/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120208/for-ipad-and-mobile-devices-a-port-out-of-the-norm/ http://allthingsd.com/20120208/for-ipad-and-mobile-devices-a-port-out-of-the-norm/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:04:27 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=172874 The pocket-size USB flash drive has become nearly ubiquitous in the PC world, for moving files among machines and for adding extra storage. But it can’t be used with most tablets because they lack standard USB ports.

Now, there’s a special, modified, pocket flash drive that works as usual with PCs and Macs, but can transfer and stream files to popular mobile devices without standard USB ports, such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and many other Android devices. Its secret: It has built-in Wi-Fi to beam the files to and from tablets and smartphones wirelessly. It can even stream files like videos to many devices simultaneously.



The AirStash drive with removable SD memory card

It’s called the AirStash and is made by a tiny company called Wearable Inc., and distributed by Maxell Corp. It’s available at Amazon.com and a few other retailers for $150 for an 8 gigabyte model, which can increase the storage capacity of a base iPad by 50 percent. An AirStash model with 16 gigabytes is $180.

The AirStash is a clever device that solves a genuine problem, though not without some issues. In my tests, it worked as advertised, without crashing or exhibiting bugs. But it’s pricey and has one big drawback: When a device is connected to the AirStash via Wi-Fi, it can’t be connected to the Internet. The company plans a fix for that as early as next month.

The AirStash looks like other USB flash drives, except a bit wider. Its storage is provided by a removable SD memory card that pops into the bottom edge. You can substitute your own larger card. In fact, you can swap in the memory card from your camera and beam your photos.

This product is aimed at the iPad and iPhone, and the company has a free app for those products that makes it easy to manage and view the files on the drive. But its wireless file transfers also work, via the Web browser, on non-Apple devices, even computers. And the company plans an Android version of the app.

A typical way to use the AirStash would be to first plug it into your computer like any flash drive and copy onto it photos, documents, videos, podcasts or songs. Then remove it from the computer and press a small button on the front of the AirStash that turns on its Wi-Fi network. Next, you connect your iPad to this network, launch the AirStash app and all the files on the drive show up.



The AirStash app allows an iPad to wirelessly import photos from the drive.



The AirStash app allows an iPad to create a new directory on the drive, below.

From the app, you can view documents, play songs, watch videos, view photos or listen to podcasts. On a non-Apple device, there’s no special app, but you can still access the content on the drive. You just link up to the AirStash Wi-Fi network, launch your Web browser and go to airstash.net. A page appears with a list of the drive’s contents.

AirStash performed some feats I found impressive. In one test, I was able, from about 75 feet away, to flawlessly watch three movies stored on the AirStash at the same time on three devices. I had “Inception” playing on an iPad, “The King’s Speech” playing on a Kindle Fire and “Star Trek” playing on a Dell laptop. I stress, none of these movies was stored on the devices—all were stored on the AirStash.

In another test, I was able to watch a movie on an iPad, play a song on an Android-based Motorola Droid and read a PDF file on a Mac, simultaneously. Once again, all these files were stored on an AirStash drive 75 feet away.

The AirStash can beam material to as many as eight devices at once, except for video, where the limit is three devices. It can beam the same video to three devices at the same time. A parent could use one AirStash to provide different videos to each of three kids during a drive in the car.

Wearable, the maker of the AirStash, boasts it works in both directions: You can also write files to the AirStash from a device like an iPad. Technically, this is true. For instance, from the AirStash app, you can export photos stored on an iPad or iPhone to the drive.

But several iPad apps for viewing or editing documents, which the company says work with AirStash, require a geeky setup process, and I couldn’t get them to send edited documents back to the drive.

There are some other limitations. For instance, on non-Apple devices, the Web interface is rudimentary, and on the Kindle Fire, music can’t be streamed from the AirStash.

Finally, unlike most other flash drives, the AirStash has a battery to power its Wi-Fi. The company claims up to seven hours of continuous battery life between charges, and while I didn’t do a formal test, the battery life seemed good to me. You can recharge the device either through a standard USB wall charger, like those that come with cellphones, or by plugging it into the USB port of a computer. In the latter case, the Wi-Fi capability can’t be used while charging.

If you’re pining for easier file transfer or expanded storage on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile device without a standard USB port, the AirStash might be the ticket, albeit an expensive one.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120208/for-ipad-and-mobile-devices-a-port-out-of-the-norm/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120126/autodesk-is-all-smiles-with-its-mac-software-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20120126/autodesk-is-all-smiles-with-its-mac-software-business/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:24:56 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=167715 Since Apple reported such monstrously successful earnings earlier this week, the whole wide world has been parsing the company’s numbers and slapping their heads at the size of the iPhone and iPad sales, and what it all means for everyone else.

But Apple is still a consumer-focused personal computer company, and one trend I like to revisit is how Apple continues to grow its presence in business and professional settings.

Here’s a pretty good indicator: If you’re in the business of designing things like machines or buildings, there’s a chance you’re using software from Autodesk. Its latest mechanical design software, called Inventor Fusion, is used by mechanical engineers to design cars and planes and factory assembly lines. It’s heavy-duty software that’s currently available on Windows. A new trial version for the Mac has just recently come out is coming out soon.

While engineering software like this tended to be run on beefed-up Windows workstations during the last decade, the Mac has started to make serious inroads among engineers and designers, especially the younger ones, says Autodesk product manager Kevin Schneider. “The younger generation of engineers has grown up with computing expectations that are completely different,” he says. They used Macs at school, probably learned to edit photos and video in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, so when they start using CAD and other software, naturally, they want it running on a Mac, too.

Autodesk makes four applications available on Apple’s App Store, and the results are pretty stunning. Those applications — Autocad LT, Autocad WS, Motion FX and Sketchbook Pro — have clocked up 2.2 million downloads via the App Store. That’s a lot for any software, and it’s a heck of a lot when you consider that these applications don’t come for free. Sketchbook Pro goes for $59.99; Autocad LT costs $899.99.

The number is even more impressive when you consider that Autodesk apps account for about 2 percent of total downloads on the App Store. Late last year, Apple announced that its store had broken the 100-million-download mark, generating 100,000 downloads a day, and making it the biggest software download site in the world.

It’s just another indication that the Mac is still making inroads against Windows in the workplace. A new Forrester Research survey of 3,350 IT decision makers finds that 46 percent of all firms in North America and Europe issued Macs to their employees in 2011; that figure was up by more than half since 2009.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120126/autodesk-is-all-smiles-with-its-mac-software-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apple-sold-more-ipads-than-hp-sold-pcs/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apple-sold-more-ipads-than-hp-sold-pcs/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:05:20 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=167231 Here’s a metric worth noting: With the monstrous quarter it reported today, Apple surpassed Hewlett-Packard in PC sales and revenue. Apple sold 15.4 million iPads and 5.2 million Macs in its first quarter. That’s more than 20 million personal computing devices. HP’s PC sales for the fourth quarter were 14.7 million, according to Gartner. Which means Apple’s iPad sales alone surpassed HP’s PC sales, as Apple Insider first noted.

Now, to be clear, Gartner’s figure doesn’t include the ill-starred TouchPad. But sources familiar with HP’s build plans say the initial TouchPad order came in somewhere between 1.8 million and two million units. So, even if HP had sold every TouchPad it built, it wouldn’t have matched Apple.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apple-sold-more-ipads-than-hp-sold-pcs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apples-monster-quarter/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apples-monster-quarter/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:30:41 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=167031 Apple’s latest quarter was a monster, all right.

Reporting first-quarter earnings after the bell on Tuesday, Apple rolled out the big numbers once again, its strong financials fueled by record iPhone and iPad sales.

The company posted a profit of $13.06 billion on revenue of $46 billion. Earnings per share were $13.87, far more than the $10.08 per share analysts had been expecting.

Apple said it sold 37.04 million iPhones for the quarter, up more than 128 percent from the year prior; 15.43 million iPads, up 111 percent (so much for the Kindle Fire …); 5.2 million Macs, up 26 percent; and nearly 15.4 million iPods, down 21 percent. Big numbers — all of them. And all but one trounced estimates.



Analysts had expected Apple to report first-quarter earnings of $10.08 a share on revenue of about $38.8 billion. And, on average, they had called for iPhone shipments of nearly 30 million, iPad shipments of about 14 million and Mac shipments of around five million.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

Apple’s guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, as per usual, is comically low: Expected revenue of $32.5 billion and earnings per diluted share of $8.50.

Apple shares, which had slipped more than 1.6 percent to $420.31 in advance of the company’s earnings announcement, are now headed back upward in after-hours trading.

NOTES FROM THE EARNINGS CALL

• Quick observations before the call: Apple now has $97 billion in cash, short- and long-term securities on hand. Apple’s profits exceeded Google’s entire revenue — $10.6 billion.
• Q1 2012 brought with it all-time highs for quarterly iPhone, iPad and Mac sales.
• Customers have downloaded more than 100 million apps from the Mac App Store in its first year.
• iPod still claims more than a 70 percent share of the MP3 market.
• The iTunes store generated $1.7 billion in revenue. $120 million in apps and music sold on Dec. 25 alone.
• Strong iPhone growth across segments driven by iPhone 4S. Siri has “captivated consumers.”
• Almost all of the Fortune 500 support the iPhone. Many are developing mission critical iPhone apps.
• iPad is popular …
• … with all segments of the market. Unprecedented adoption in Fortune 500 and education.
• More than 600,000 copies of iBooks Author have been downloaded so far.
• 85 million iCloud customers so far.
• By the end of this month, developers will have earned $4 billion cumulatively from App Store sales.
• $6.1 billion in revenue from Apple retail stores. Each store generated an average of $17.1 million in revenue last quarter. That’s an increase of 43 percent from the year prior.
• “We are actively discussing uses of our cash balance. But we have nothing to announce at this time. … We’re not letting it burn a hole in our pocket.”
• Tim Cook: “The reception for the iPhone 4S has been breathtaking. … We made a very bold bet on demand, and it turns out we were short on supply throughout the quarter. … Actually, we ended it with a significant backlog. We’re still short in key geographies.”
• Cook: “I think we made the right decision to go with a broad range of iPhones.”
• Demand for the iPhone in China is “staggering.” Even though Apple is only selling through its Web site and retail partners, “demand is off the charts.”
• Flooding in Thailand has forced Apple to pay more for hard drives. There wasn’t a material supply or cost impact on any product lines in the December quarter, but there will likely be a cost increase in March.
• Cook: We’re really happy with the 15.4 million iPads we were able to sell. This is consistent with our long-term belief that this is a huge opportunity for Apple over time. And, as I’ve said before, there will come a day that the tablet market is larger than the PC market. IDC’s recent data shows that tablet sales exceeded desktop PC sales in the U.S. There is significant momentum in this space.
• In terms of competitiveness, the iPad ecosystem is in a class by itself. We now have 70,000 apps. … I think people really want to do multiple things with their tablets, so we don’t see these limited-function tablets and e-readers as being in the same category as iPad. We don’t think people who want an iPad will settle for a limited-function device.
• Peter Oppenheimer on Apple’s $97 billion in cash, and what the company might do with it: “We know it’s growing. We’re talking about it. … When we have something to announce, we’ll announce it.” He really doesn’t want to answer questions about this.
• Cook on Apple TV and a possible Apple Television: Apple TV is doing extremely well; we just sold a record 104 million units. But we still classify this area as a hobby. We think it’s a fantastic product, and we continue to pull strings and see where we can take it.
• Another question about that $97 billion. Did I mention that Oppenheimer really doesn’t want to answer questions about Apple’s cash?
• Cook: We’re thrilled with iCloud. The response from our customers has been incredible. We’ve signed up 80 million customers in three months. It’s not a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.
• Nothing much to say about adding more iPhone carriers in China. Cook: “It’s an important market, and we continue to look at how to grow it further.”
• Question about Anobit acquisition, but Oppenheimer dodges.
• Cook on the iPhone in India and Russia: We’re selling in Russia through reseller and carrier partners, and we’re doing the same thing in India. … The next country on our list is Brazil — there’s a huge opportunity there. But I don’t envision Apple Retail going there in the near term.
• Cook: When I looked at the data, particularly in the U.S., after Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, there wasn’t an obvious effect, plus or minus.
• Cook: “There is cannibalization of the Mac by iPad, but there’s much more cannibalization of the PC. We love that trend. The iPad is beginning to appear everywhere. Enterprise has adopted it, education … we sold twice as many iPads into education as we did Macs. … It’s remarkable; we’ve sold 55 million iPads and we’ve only been in the business since April of 2010.”
• Cook on Android versus iPhone: I wouldn’t compare it to Mac and Windows. The Mac has outgrown the market 20 quarters in a row, but still has single-digit market share. We’ve sold over 315 million iOS devices, and over 62 million were sold in the last quarter alone. I don’t have comparable numbers for Android, as I haven’t found a way to get very crisp quarterly reporting for Android like we do, that is transparent and reliable. … Nielsen shows iPhone at 45 percent and Android at 47; comScore shows iPhone at 42 and Android at 41. It’s a very close race.
• I wouldn’t say this is a two-horse race. There’s a horse in Redmond that always suits up and runs. There are always other players. We’ll just want to focus on making great products. We ignore the number of horses on the track — we just want to be the one in the lead.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/apples-monster-quarter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120124/will-apple-redefine-the-meaning-of-earnings-blowout/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/will-apple-redefine-the-meaning-of-earnings-blowout/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:33:23 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=166676 After a rare earnings disappointment last quarter, Apple is poised to return to form when it reports its first-quarter numbers today.

In other words, it’s going to be a blowout.

And for a number of reasons. Foremost, this is the first quarter to include the new iPhone 4S, which went on sale last October. Apple sold one million of them in the device’s first day at market, and some analysts estimate that, together with the iPhone 4 and 3GS, the company sold upward of 30 million iPhones during the quarter.

Another thing: When Apple last reported earnings, CEO Tim Cook said he was “confident we will set an all-time record for iPhones this quarter.”

So there’s that, too.

Add to it a particularly strong holiday quarter product lineup — iPhone 4S, iPad 2, MacBook Air — and it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Apple doesn’t trounce expectations. Certainly, the company would seem to have all the makings of a beat — a big one, too.

So expect some big numbers from Apple after market close today, and perhaps even another one of those ebullient “best quarter ever” pronouncements.

Wall Street currently expects Apple to report first-quarter earnings of $10.08 a share on revenue of about $38.8 billion. And analysts, on average, are calling for iPhone shipments of nearly 30 million, iPad shipments of about 14 million and Mac shipments of around five million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/will-apple-redefine-the-meaning-of-earnings-blowout/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120110/digging-deeper-into-roots-with-spruced-up-ancestry-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20120110/digging-deeper-into-roots-with-spruced-up-ancestry-com/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:59:53 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=162609 When my great grandfather signed his World War I draft registration card in 1917, I’m pretty sure he never imagined I’d be examining it 95 years later with a touch screen sitting on my lap.

This week, I took a fresh look at this and several other gems from my family history with help from a company that has led the charge in online genealogy for 15 years: Ancestry.com. Thanks to mobile apps, other users and a new ability to synchronize content between the Web and desktop software, Ancestry has grown into a robust tool.



The World War I draft card for the author’s great grandfather.

Since I last tested Ancestry in 2006, the company has revamped its desktop software program, Family Tree Maker, so the program can synchronize with Web-based data on Ancestry.com. It’s now available as a mobile app for the iPhone, iPad and Android phones. And the site holds over eight billion records, including content from a partnership with the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The addition of mobile apps plus the syncing feature make Ancestry.com more useful and will bring me back to the site more often. I found several new things on Ancestry this time around, including more census data, ship manifests for two cruises an aunt took, and more suggested family-tree data from other users.

I tested Ancestry.com, its iPhone and iPad apps and the Family Tree Maker desktop software on a Mac. I found a computer to be the best tool for inputting family information like names, birth dates, death dates and locations using Ancestry.com and the Family Tree Maker software. The iPad app was the most enjoyable way of exploring my family-tree records. The site’s pricing can be confusing given the various membership and access levels.

A simple right-to-left swipe on the iPad screen shifted my view of the tree from one branch to the next. In four swipes, I dove back in time to read about my mother’s father’s mother’s mother, Florence Antonia Ford, and her family in the 1910 Census record. Using the iPad on my lap, related records from Ancestry felt more personal than seeing them on a computer. A pinch-to-zoom gesture let me clearly read names and details in each record. (Records can be magnified on a computer screen as well, which is helpful when studying small cursive writing or type, like a 1935 passenger list for a cruise to Bermuda that included my Great Aunt Romayne’s name.)

I was delighted to find data I entered on Ancestry.com six years ago was still in my account, which saved me the trouble of inputting everything again. A new feature called TreeSync let me synchronize all of my family-tree information over to my Family Tree Maker desktop software, and vice versa. After using the Ancestry app on my iPad and adding records to my family tree, I easily synced that data with my desktop software by clicking a top-right button when I next opened the Family Tree Maker.

Users who have spent years on Family Tree Maker software, which has been around for 23 years, will be able to sync data from their PCs to the Web version of their family trees. They can now opt to make their trees public for all Ancestry users to access, thus growing the online database.

I found the desktop software to be more heavy-duty than the website and mobile apps, but its interface is a bit antiquated in comparison.



Winston Churchill’s family tree seen via Ancestry.com’s app on the iPad.

Whenever Ancestry.com has a “hint” to show you about a name you entered on your tree, a green leaf appears beside that name. Selecting that leaf lets you see anything in the Ancestry database that may be associated with that name. These could include paper records scanned in by Ancestry.com or content entered by other people. You can view these hints and, if applicable, merge that data with your own after viewing a side-by-side comparison of your information and the new information.

You can share your findings with friends via Facebook, Twitter or email. When I saw my grandfather’s signature on his World War I draft card, I clicked one button and shared this digitized memento from 1917 with friends and family on Facebook. Content shared from Ancestry.com can be seen by other people, even if they don’t have an account, for up to 14 days. You also can keep everything private.

I know quite a bit about my family history, thanks to work my grandfather did years ago, and this helped me with entering names and knowing which hints were relevant or not. For example, an Ancestry-suggested hint that a record for Florence Ladley was for Florence Antonia Ford in my tree wasn’t accurate. I made the most progress when I called my parents for more names and dates.

Ancestry.com offers a free 14-day trial, after which fees range from $13 to $35 a month, depending on six-month or monthly memberships and whether a person is paying for U.S. Discovery (all records in the U.S.) or World Explorer (unlimited access, including records from other countries) access. The Family Tree Maker software, which starts at around $32, can be downloaded to Macs or Windows PCs or bought in stores. Combined pricing for the desktop software and access to the website starts around $40.

Email katie.boehret@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120110/digging-deeper-into-roots-with-spruced-up-ancestry-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120109/enterprise-will-spend-19-billion-on-apple-hardware-in-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20120109/enterprise-will-spend-19-billion-on-apple-hardware-in-2012/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:02:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=161393 The “Bring Your Own Device” philosophy spreading through enterprise these days is proving a real boon to Apple.

The company is expected to sell $10 billion worth of iPads and $9 billion of Macs to business customers in 2012, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook. Those are 68 percent and 45 percent increases, respectively, over 2011.

And in 2013, spending on iPads and Macs could hit $16 billion and $12 billion respectively. Slowly but surely, Apple is making inroads into enterprise, a sector traditionally dominated by Microsoft. And, as Forrester notes, that is somewhat unexpected.

“The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market thus is … Apple,” the research outfit says in its report. “This is a surprise, because Apple has not and does not directly address the corporate market, while turning a wide variety of consumer technology markets upside-down. But its rapid growth in the corporate market has been the big surprise of 2011, and it will be even more of a factor in 2012.”



How can that be, when we so rarely hear stories about big enterprise deployments of Apple hardware? As Forrester explains, “The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent. That’s because corporate adoption of Apple products has been largely clandestine.”

Clandestine? If Apple’s not aggressively pushing its hardware into the enterprise market, how is it getting there?

Carried in by the rank and file. Employees are buying iPhones and iPads, and sometimes even MacBooks, as well. And enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end. Sometimes, it’s even subsidizing them or their use. This is the “consumerization of IT” we’re hearing so much about these days, and clearly it’s working very much in Apple’s favor.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120109/enterprise-will-spend-19-billion-on-apple-hardware-in-2012/feed/ 0