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While all the Apple buzz is about the iPhone 3GS, Snow Leopard is looking like much more important announcement for Apple. Both were announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference a few weeks ago, they're both significant steps forward for existing products. While the 3GS is sexier, Snow Leopard has under-the-hood improvements in the operating system that will help carry Apple into the future.

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The Chinese government has been having a rough month. The authorities there have been dialing back already limited Internet freedoms to discourage disruptive remembrance of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. In early June, authorities let slip that starting in July PCs shipped in China would have to include Web filtering software called Green Dam.

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Steve Jobs, who went on medical leave in January because of an undisclosed medical condition, had a liver transplant in Tennessee two months ago, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. He's on the mend and will be back at work at the end of this month -- which is to say, within 10 days.

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I don't expect special treatment when I've been doing business with a company for a while, I'm generally content to be treated the same as anyone else. But I don't expect to be treated worse than other customers, to get the small half of the pie, the ice cream cone that somebody dropped on the ground. And yet that's what AT&T and Apple are doing with loyal iPhone customers.

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Leander Kahney on the Cult of Mac blog reports that that a hacker claims to have phished Steve Jobs, obtained his Amazon.com account login information, and snooped through his purchases.

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Every IT person has dreams about the technologies they really want for their business. In current economic conditions, however, you may need to downsize your expectations.

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The other day, I tweeted that it would be awesome if the Amazon Kindle store sold books through the Stanza iPhone app. Yesterday, Amazon acquired Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. I must never use this power for evil.

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First of all: I want to know what they're smoking in Cupertino -- and where I can get a duffel bag full of the stuff? The famous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is apparently strong enough to enclose the company in an economic boom, even as the rest of the world is going through the toughest times in at least a generation.

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I've been watching the tech news and shocked by how Mac market share is receding due to the recession. Apple executives are putting on a not-worried public face -- in the company's last quarterly earnings call, CEO Steve Jobs said that Mac users are loyal. They'll postpone buying, but they won't switch to Windows. That was true during the last recession -- but is it still true today?

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Another reputable news organization is reporting independent confirmation that Apple plans to launch a netbook with a touchscreen as early as the second half of this year, while a prominent tech blogger shares some interesting analysis that the device will be a keyboardless tablet.

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Apple's role as benevolent dictator of the iPhone ecosystem has pluses and minuses. Lately, however, it has become apparent that the company can't manage the control it insists upon. It risks becoming an incompetent dictator, and that's the kind of regime that's prone to collapse.

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Apple this week upgraded its desktop line, boosting the speed and power of its Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. The Mini is once again a nice low-end system for someone looking for a second Mac. The company added even more power to the Mac Pro, its high-end desktop for people who need a lot of power and are willing to spend a lot of money for it. That leaves the all-in-one iMac stuck in the middle. In an era when desktop PC sales are being eroded by netbooks, notebook computers, and the floundering economy, how long will the iMac survive?

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Apple shareholders are taking the company to task over how it handled disclosures about Steve Jobs's health, saying the company needs to be more forthcoming about the CEO's condition. But Apple directors say they've done nothing wrong -- and that nothing has changed since Jobs announced last month that he was withdrawing from day-to-day operations, and the ailing CEO plans a June return.

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Apple OS X may have been approved for government sale since 2003, but the company has recently ramped up its pursuit of government customers, according to a source.

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ZDNet's Adrian Kinglsey-Hughes writes a blog I would have agreed with 100% a few weeks ago, ridiculing the idea of Apple shipping a netbook. A netbook is a machine for the budget market, he argues. Apple makes devices for people willing to spend more to get the best, and isn't going to compromise quality to cut costs. "If I was going to go down that line I'd also want a cheap yacht, a cheap Rolex, and a cheap Ferrari," he argues.

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Steve Jobs won't be at this week's Apple annual meeting, the first he's missed since he returned to the company more than 10 years ago, according to reports. Jobs, who was successfully treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004, stepped aside from day-to-day responsibilities for six months starting in January, citing uncontrolled weight loss.

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It took fancy footwork for Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to invent the Apple computer. Now, Woz will get a chance to display fancy footwork of a different kind when he competes on Dancing With The Stars on TV this year, which premieres Monday, March 9.

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Apple is planning to release the next version of the iPhone in June, with support for running apps in the background and a brand new, more powerful hardware architecture, according to reports on the buzzing Apple blogs.

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New Zealand's Chris Ogle probably thought it was his lucky day when he scored a used MP3 player cheap. But his luck soured when it turned out to be broken -- and loaded with 60 pages of U.S. military data and personally identifying information.

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Productivity maven Merlin Man, author of the blog 43 Folders, gives a video tour of his Mac desktop in his uniquely entertaining and informative style, talking about the tools that help him work. After watching this video, I spent hours and hours fiddling with the tools Merlin recommends, which I'm sure will save me minutes of wasted time.

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Apple's top brass let slip some tantalizing clues about the company's plans for an "iPhone Nano," netbook, and Apple TV during the their quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday. Or did they? With Apple, it's always hard to tell.

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While Apple's fourth-quarter earnings defied the economic slowdown, breaking its own revenue and earnings records even in the middle of the malaise, the news wasn't all good.

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I have a great deal of respect for the journalistic principles that Wikileaks espouses, but the site has done itself and journalism a disservice: It has published images that purport to show part of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' medical file, one of which is acknowledged to be fake and the other of which is deemed suspect.

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Up until last week, it was hard to imagine Apple without Steve Jobs. But in the face of Jobs's announcement that he's temporarily stepping aside as CEO, some new management faces have taken the spotlight at Apple. It's become apparent that the company has a deep enough management bench that it can continue to thrive, even in the absence of its charismatic co-founder. It'll be a tough job, and the Apple that emerges will be a different company, but at least potentially still powerful and still producing great, innovative products.

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The reporting about Steve Jobs' health has been the very picture of a media feeding frenzy. We've seen rumors and speculation reported as fact, and streams of self-righteousness pouring forth from keyboards. Three examples hit my in-box today, from Gizmodo, Fake Steve Jobs, and Bloomberg.

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I couldn't disagree more with this New York Times blog post demanding that Apple and Steve Jobs come clean about his health. By taking a leave of absence as CEO, Jobs has made his health a private matter.

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Over the past day, since Apple revealed that Steve Jobs is stepping aside for five months to manage his health problems, I've been impressed by the way that Apple and Jobs have handled disclosures about his condition. They've stumbled a couple of times over the past half-year or so, since the issue first emerged. They haven't always been as forthcoming as perhaps they should be. But, still, overall, they've visibly been trying to do the right thing, motivated by a desire to balance personal rights to privacy with the public good. They take their responsibility to investors and the public seriously.

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Apple has a deep management bench and will continue to thrive without Steve Jobs at the helm, according to Apple bloggers and journalists. The company announced today that Jobs is taking a five-month medical leave of absence, which sent the company's stock price into a dive. Nonetheless, blogger Robert Scoble and other bloggers and journalists expressed confidence in the company. "You are an idiot if you sell your Apple stock tomorrow," Scoble wrote.

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Steve Jobs plans to take a medical leave of absence from Apple until June, to focus on his medical conditions, which, he said in a statement on the Apple Web site, "are more complex than I originally thought." Apple COO Tim Cook will oversee day-to-day operations.

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Update, 5 pm EST: Several hours after I posted this blog, Apple announced that Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence.

Apple seems to have learned from Bill Clinton. Like our randy former chief executive being questioned about his sex life, Apple handled Steve Jobs' ongoing health problems by making statements that were literally true, but ultimately misleading. That's going to have Apple watchers taking a microscope to every statement and action by Apple to find out what the company really means. But Apple watchers already are doing that, so Apple doesn't lose out.

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All last week I worked frantically on an article previewing this week's Macworld conference. The big news prior to the conference was the rumor that Steve Jobs was sick -- declining rapidly, too sick to work. "Nobody, however," I wrote, "has presented a single scrap of evidence that Jobs is actually sick. It's all a bunch of gossip." Several hours after I posted that article, Jobs released a statement that he is sick. I really hope this isn't a sign of how the rest of the week is going to go for me.

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This morning, Apple CEO Steve Jobs sent out a letter to the Apple community. The letter addresses Steve's health in a straightforward manner to dispel rumors that Mr. Jobs is on his deathbed. Read the entire letter here.

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With Steve Jobs passing on the January classic and Apple pulling out altogether after next year, the brain trust at IDG is hosting a town hall meeting of Macintosh faithful for suggestions. Is there wisdom in the collective?

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The iPod Touch was a hugely popular gift for Christmas last week. If you got an iPod Touch or iPhone, read on for pointers to our favorite free and cheap iPod Touch apps. And if you didn't get an iPhone or Touch, we have some alternatives for you.

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I spend 80% of my work life in a 100% Mac shop. While I’ve used VM solutions from Sun, VMware, and Parallels on Apple hardware for InformationWeek, we've been a Parallels shop at my day job 'cause, frankly, the company was first top market with Mac desktop and server offerings. We’re much happier with this latest rev of Desktop.

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Two things you shouldn't expect to see at the Macworld Conference & Expo this year: Steve Jobs, and a netbook computer. Apple announced this week that Jobs will break tradition and not deliver a Stevenote. That's a fact. Meanwhile, Ezra Gothheil, analyst at Technology Business Research, predicts that Apple will launch a $599 "netbook" notebook computer at the January conference. That's speculation -- and I think it's wrong, too.

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This is an era where the conversation with customers is critical, or so we're told. So why is Apple arguably the hottest company around?

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The first annual bMighty.com Innovation Awards recognize a dozen products released this year that hold special appeal for growing businesses -- and for everyone else, too.

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So now the latest iteration of the iPhone hasn't just been "jailbroken," it's snagged a visa to another country entirely. A project named OpeniBoot lets you boot Linux on the iPhone -- admittedly with little more than a command line, but for Linux that's more than enough to begin with.

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When I came in this morning, Twitter was buzzing over an Apple parody that ran on The Simpsons last night. Homer, Marge, and the kids visit the Mapple Store at the mall and admire the MyPods and MyPhones. The segment includes a parody-in-a-parody of the famous 1984 Apple "Big Brother" commercial, featuring Comic Book Guy instead of an athletic woman with Eurythmics hair. Watch the embedded video below, until YouTube takes it down.

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Apple released a QuickTime update that allows standard-definition iTunes movies to play over new MacBooks' DisplayPort to older displays, according to reports on Apple blogs. However, high-def movies are still blocked, which is unfair to owners of MacBooks and other systems by other vendors that use the same technology.

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Best Buy is getting ready to slash prices on new Macs and other Apple products, and Apple has authorized employees of its own retail stores to match the price cuts, according to reports on Apple blogs. That's bad news for store margins, but good news for Apple fans hoping for some fruity goodness under the tree.

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The biggest improvement in the iPhone software Version 2.2 is in the Maps application -- particularly the addition of Street View. It's a slick implementation that gets a lot of information into a very small screen. You can figure out the new Street View and other Maps features easily, especially if you've already used Maps.

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Users of brand-new aluminum MacBooks are being blocked from playing movies on some external displays because of DRM built into the devices at the behest of Hollywood, according to reports. External displays used to play the movies need to comply with the High Definition Content Protection standard, according to David Chartier at Ars Technica.

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Is it possible to be very happy and very disappointed with a service at the same time? That's the way I've felt about the GrandCentral phone service since Google bought it last year. I'm happy because GrandCentral does the job that I wanted it to do: Callers dial one number, and it rings my cell phone, office phone, and home phone, in any combination I desire.

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Perception does NOT equal reality. Many technologies simply can't live up to their hype, while others languish in unwarranted obscurity. bMighty.com pumps up the hidden gems and takes the blowhards down a peg.

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The bane of the cell phone industry is that its software needs to be rewritten for every new model. And since new cell phones come along about as often as, ah, cell phone commercials on TV, that's a problem. The answer is virtualization -- break the dependence on hardware of a piece of software written for a particular device.

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The next iPhone software update will include the ability to download podcast episodes over the air, reducing the need to sync the device with a desktop computer, according to reports. For podcast listeners, that cuts another major tether attaching the iPhone to a desktop or notebook computer.

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As early reviews of Windows 7 come in, it appears that Microsoft is getting a start at putting Vista behind it, the way the Coca-Cola Company did with New Coke. That's good news for Windows users -- and bad news for Apple, which has leveraged Microsoft's weakness to drive market gains.

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At first glance, the iPhone has all the ingredients needed to support turn-by-turn directions. It runs GPS. It runs Google Maps. It has audio output and a speaker. So why doesn't the iPhone give you real-time turn-by-turn directions? The answer, I think, is that turn-by-turn directions are more complicated to deliver than they seem to be. Much as I want my iPhone to tell me where to turn when I'm driving, I'm not optimistic that we'll see that capability anytime soon.

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