If you were hoping for massive changes in Apple’s OS X 10.9 operating system, you may be disappointed when the company officially reveals it at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.

The next version of OS X, which uses the code name Cabernet, won’t be full overhaul like Apple did with OS X Leopard or Lion, according to a 9to5Mac report. Mostly that means the user interface changes will be minimal and everything will largely still be in the same place as it was in the previous version of the OS. But there are some notable upgrades worth getting excited about.

Some of the bigger changes to the OS include tags and tabbed browsing coming to the OS X Finder window. That means you’ll no longer have to juggle multiple Finder windows when searching for a file, or pulling/organizing from different drives or networks. There’s also mention of a completely revamped Safari web browser that loads pages faster.

According to the report’s sources, there will be a number of changes that help merge OS X with mobile operating system iOS, too. Previously, the company added iOS familiar features like Messages, Airplay, Reminders, and Game Center. This release could see more support for multiple monitors — specifically for the purpose of adding the app switching functionality that you find on OS X. The app switching may also be an option you can assign as a different “Space,” which makes a lot of sense. So, instead of getting access to a different desktop, you’d just assign certain programs to switch between.

On the back-end, Apple could also add the “pausing” functionality to apps that aren’t being used, which could speed up performance by conserving your computer’s resources. For example, running two browsers, Adobe Photoshop, and World of Warcraft would really do a number on your system resources.

At this point, there’s no word on whether the next OS X version will include functionality for Siri, Apple’s voice control assistant.

WWDC, Apple’s annual news orgy and developer conference, has sold out. A mere two minutes after the announced start time fo 10 a.m. Pacific, the WWDC website was stating that tickets were no longer available.

Last year, WWDC sold out in a few hours. This year, with a modicum of advance warning, developers snatched up every single one of the $1,599 tickets within a few seconds.

So, what can you look forward to from WWDC 2013?

At this year’s event, Apple is expected to unveil and release the latest versions of iOS, its mobile operating system, as well as its desktop operating system, OS X.

But if you’re waiting anxiously for some exciting, new — or any new — hardware to emerge from the bowels of the Cupertino behemoth (like that colorful imagery?), you can settle in for a spell. CEO Tim Cook, has already announced that Apple will have no product announcements until fall 2013.

“Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014,” Cook said in the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday.

“We look forward to gathering at WWDC 2013 with the incredible community of iOS and OS X developers,” said Apple SVP Phil Schiller in a statement yesterday announcing the ticket sale.

“Our developers have had the most prolific and profitable year ever, and we’re excited to show them the latest advances in software technologies and developer tools to help them create innovative new apps. We can’t wait to get new versions of iOS and OS X into their hands at WWDC.”

Image credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

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Georges van Hoegaerden is an entrepreneur, venture catalyst, serial CEO, and venture capitalist-turned-innovation economist.

As a 20-year Apple user who has infected almost everyone close to me with convincing reasons to abandon subprime computing platforms, it hurts me to have to group and introduce the reasons why I think Apple’s once-infinite loop is turning gradually finite.

Toss the pageantry of false positivity

Now, one could take this message as a negative or a positive depending on which side of the technology world you are on. Yet I am neither a fair-weather friend nor a weapons-trader in this competitive war. I am an independent thinker more worried about the only thing that matters: value to customers. I still admire Apple for its unique — if not perfect — desire and pursuit of authentic innovative value.

I’ve written this editorial as an honest appraisal of the business of innovation and to ensure innovation’s role in delivering authentic social economic value is one the public can trust. Apple is the spiritual and commercial leader in innovation, so it should expect to not only be held to the highest of standards by the public, but also be intrigued by someone who, when they had a lot less wind in their sails, was already rooting for the company.

The latest price reduction in the MacBook Pro line forced my hand to collect and share the many finite patterns I see developing at Apple. The trigger was the pageantry of false positivity applauding the recent price reduction of the MacBook Pro sold to customers. Even though the MacBook Pro 13″ Retina is truly a product worth buying (I have reviewed it personally), the underlying economics of the $200 price reduction are a bit startling.

Act different

Apple is a producer of premium technology with a unique proprietary blend of hardware and software that can demand premium pricing for its products when that innovation delivers consumers a more compelling computing experience and evolution.

But one who connects the dots and sets their own standards of excellence has to wonder.

Why does Apple deploy the equivalent of modern-day slavery in China to save cost — arguably at the expense of American manufacturing — if the consumer value and margin can withstand no less than a $200 price reduction?

Apple succeeds because it is macro-economically different from any of its competitors today. It is the most profitable technology company on our planet not because it competes on price (downside) but because it competes on value (upside). And Apple’s future is secured when it continues to drive the value over market share.

But the pattern I see developing at Apple now is a dangerous one that trades the infinite evolution of upstream innovation for the finite development of operational efficiency.

The pattern

Here are the signals that contribute to the pattern I detect:

• Since Steve’s passing Apple has not delivered any upstream innovation of significance to top-line growth, but an abundance of downstream optimizations derived from Steve’s long lasting upstream vision, perhaps to comfort a nervous Wall Street.
• Tim Cook spends too much time publicly discussing details of operational capabilities without the balanced exposure to and invention of upstream product deliverables that pay the bills. Managing Apple for a long-term strategy means aligning prime resources to vision and upstream innovation. Apple’s execution today is a mediocre extrapolation of what current managers think Steve Jobs would have done, rather than a diligent execution of leadership that knows how to take control.
• All of Apple’s operating systems are in dire need of re-invention. iOS, OSX and server software need fundamental change: upstream innovation that makes them come to life in serving the digital media hubs we as people otherwise need to manually manage. The improvements that we do see seem discombobulated and the misaligned.
• Some of Apple’s products are turning mediocre. An address book that holds six thousand contacts freezes up on every device it is synced to, and sends mail, calendar and other applications in a 40 minute tailspin when you add a single contact. Features prevalent in the distribution of internet content (RSS) disappear from one Safari release to the other, making its users flee to competitive browsers. Shell wakeup and Power Nap differ depending on what MacBook you own. iPhone5 material is sub-quality, scratching easily. Product Management has sunken into the dark catacombs of subordinates. Apple is failing exactly on the basis of the premium computing experience that made it beloved.
• Apple, despite many proclamations to want to do the right thing, is actually in blatant violation of free-market principles in the distribution of music, books, movies and other digital media, perhaps because many technologists do not understand the finite nature of greater-fool economics. Those violations — in addition to fixed pricing mechanisms and collusion — are artificially restricting supply and demand for media, and reducing the viability of creative freedom.
• Price erosion continues. Less than two days after Steve Jobs died I was offered a business discount on Apple products. Not because I wanted it or desired it: The reason for me to buy Apple has always been value, not price. For the first time since Steve Jobs’ passing Apple put previous products and next generation products in the same keynote slide, to catch the buyers who can’t afford current generation products. A slap in the face of renewable value.

There are many more signals I could list that contribute to the pattern I see. But for the sake of time I will now stop here. A complete log of the finite loop signals of Apple can now be found here. All my articles on Apple, including positive, are here.

I gain nothing by criticising Apple. I do not get paid to write this article, and I don’t advertise. I have friends at Apple who will frown on me, and I have a book to finish (on renewable economics) that will get delayed by this distraction.

The only thing I want is for Apple to grow up, to become the responsible adult it needs to be to appease new customers with incredible and renewable innovation. In fact, all of us in the technology business need to learn a hard lesson that to encircle the world, we better learn how to embrace it. The lesson Apple gets to face first.

And if that requires me to be the tough daddy to get us there, so be it.

This article was originally published at The Venture Company.

Georges is an entrepreneur, venture catalyst, serial CEO, venture capitalist turned innovation economist (by fate) and the inventor of renewable economics that will re-authenticate and re-inspire the world, the subject of his first book. Georges’ insights have been generously lauded and covered in major online publications and trade media, such as The Wallstreet Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Business Week, Fortune, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters PEHub, AltAssets, Pensions & Investments, Investors’ Business Daily, Portfolio and hundreds of distributions across the globe.

photo credit: boogah via photopin cc

Apple is known for having relatively few massive bugs in its software, but that doesn’t mean bugs don’t exist.

Last week, developers posting on OpenRadar discovered a fatal bug capable of crippling nearly any Mac application by simply typing in the 8-character code, which causes the app to crash. Hilariously, this means Apple’s native Mac error reporter app is also susceptible to the bug.

I’ve tested this bug in a few Mac apps myself this morning, and can confirm that it indeed does cause them to crash instantaneously — even when copying and pasting the eight characters accompanied by other text. I had someone using a Windows machine IM me the code, which didn’t crash my app — meaning you actually have to type the characters for the crashing to occur.

The bug only affects apps that run on Apple’s latest OS X version Mountain Lion, but none of the older versions (Leopard, Snow Leopard, or Lion OS X). TheNextWeb points out that the bug has something to do with how an app recognizes dates that are typed, which it’s typically used to help add events and schedule meetings to your calendar.

If you’ve tested this out, or been the subject of a nasty prank, you should know that there is a way to stop your Mac apps from constantly crashing. OpenRadar forum user Shess said that you’ll need to go into your System Preferences >Language & Text>Text, and do the following: “uncheck ‘Correct spelling automatically’ and ‘Use symbol and text substitution’. Both need to be unchecked.”

Since the bug was publicized over the weekend, I’m sure Apple is probably aware of it by now, and will issue a fix in the next OS X update.

Apple is reportedly gearing up to move the production lines of its Mac Mini computer to the U.S., along with its manufacturing partner Foxconn, according to Digitimes.

While Digitimes has had a rocky history with Apple rumors (mainly because it reports every single thing it hears), this news makes a lot of sense. Mac Mini shipments are on the rise, after climbing more than 40 percent this year to around 1.4 million units. It’s also quickly becoming a powerful little device: This year’s Mac Mini upgrade includes an option for a fast quad-core Intel Core i7 processor running at 2.3 gigahertz.

Apple announced earlier this month that it will spend more than $100 million to bring some Mac production back to the U.S. next year, but it didn’t specify which models would get the special treatment. Previous speculation pointed to the Mac Pro, Apple’s massive desktop, though that model hasn’t received a major design upgrade in some time (and it’s been overshadowed for years by innovations in Apple’s iMac and MacBook lines). It makes more sense for Apple to focus on a device that’s on the rise for its triumphant U.S. return instead of one that’s on the decline.

Digitimes notes that Mac Mini shipments are expected to rise another 30 percent in 2013 to 1.8 million.

While desktops are falling out of fashion, an inexpensive and tiny computer like the Mac Mini could end up being a worthy alternative for many. It’s already packing a fast processor — now all Apple needs to do is give it better graphics capabilities to satisfy gamers and media professionals.

Two major, yet controversial, features from iOS could be making their way to Apple’s OS X desktop operating system.

The virtual assistant Siri and Apple’s Maps code have both appeared in early test builds of OS X 10.9, the next version of Apple’s desktop OS, which we expect to ship next year, sources tell 9to5Mac.

If true, the moves make sense for Apple: Siri is now one of the company’s most iconic features on the iPhone, even though it doesn’t work quite as well as advertised. And while Apple’s Maps application leaves much to be desired, such as ridiculous aerial views that somehow leave out things like the Statue of Liberty and the Hoover Dam, it can’t remain a mobile-only feature for long.

Apple already offers voice dictation, one of Siri’s big features, within OS X Mountain Lion. But desktop Mac users don’t have access to Siri’s voice-powered commands for looking up things on the web, checking your calendar, and the like. And even though Mac users aren’t exactly clamoring for Apple’s Maps, the company still needs to find a way to bring the service to the desktop.

The sources say that Apple is bringing Maps into OS X as a framework, not an app, which would allow developers to easily integrate it into their apps. But that could be the first step towards Apple releasing a full-fledged desktop Maps app (though that possibility is mostly conjecture at this point).

It all has to do with skeuomorphic design.

I’m guessing most of us didn’t have a clue what that was yesterday, but very likely many of us have encountered it and wondered about it in Apple products.

Skeuomorphic design is design that connects the new to the old with decorative but unnecessary elements. An example is Apple’s iCal app, which includes a faux-leather header with vestiges of ripped-off paper immediately below, as if we were all ripping paper pages off our computer monitors:

A similar example is Apple’s Notes app, with a little less leather but a little more rip:

One problem with skeuomorphic design is that it doesn’t fit Apple’s design aesthetic in so many other apps. For instance, Safari or Mail don’t have any leather or ripped off pages. For Safari, that could be understood, as there are no pre-technological antecedents: no-one had a web browser before the personal computer became ubiquitous. But mail had been invented … and yet Apple’s Mail app showed no design cues of parchment or inkwells and the like.

The overall experience led to a strange dichotomy of design, where sleek, functional apps such as Safari and QuickTime were matched side-by-side with frankly old-fashioned-looking apps. That was confusing from Apple, supposedly the high priest of design.

iPhoto, for instance, bears no resemblance to a old-fashioned photo album:

The other, more philosophical, and arguably bigger issue is that skeuomorphic design is inherently distasteful to many designers. It is decorative, not functional. It is excess, bigger in size and heavier in cognitive load than a user interface that is slimmed down to its bare essentials. And yes, if that sounds like a certain Apple design guru, Jony Ive hated it.

Of course, Scott Forstall didn’t oversee all design at Apple. However, he was in charge of iOS, and iOS is by far Apple’s most popular operating system, and the operating system of its cash cow (OS X is found in products accounting for under 20 percent of Apple’s revenue). Forstall was a fan of skeuomorphic design — as, it must be admitted, was Steve Jobs to a degree — and the results can be found in Apple apps.

iBooks, Find My Friends, and Newstand are only a few of the examples. Wood and leather show up in copious quantities on the high-res glass screen of one of the most modern digital artifacts ever created:

Again, the effect is inconsistent with other Apple apps such as Mail and is oddly jarring as the user is taken from a super-modern, clean, simple user interface into one with a lot of extra weight, detail, and effect.

To a designer like Jony Ive, who has spent his life and career removing excess, trimming away unneeded detail, and simplifying, there is something inherently dishonest about skeuomorphic design. It’s something of a lie … there is no wood in your iPhone, no dead animal skin, and there’s no paper on your laptop screen to be torn off.

As such, we can expect big visual changes in the next versions of Apple apps in iOS and OS X. And, if all goes well, we can thank Scott Forstall’s departure for the simplification or, perhaps, consolidation of Apple’s design language.

Image credits: Top, Wikipedia, all others, John Koetsier

Today we had one of the biggest Apple events I can remember. Between hardware and software, Apple announced at least six new products today, seven if you include Apple Fusion Drive, and a whopping 23 new products if you include different models and build configurations.

Here’s the full list:

• New iBooks software
• New retina 13″ Macbook Pro (two build configurations)
• Mac Mini (three build configurations)
• iMac (at least two sizes, each probably with at least two build configurations)
• Apple Fusion Drive (not a standalone product, but very cool, and an orderable option)
• 4th-generation iPad (six main models)
• iPad mini (six models)

Tim Cook spoke to the huge number of new products — and his team’s effort — at the end of the event.

“We told you we’d deliver amazing innovation this year,” Cook said, “and I hope you’ll agree we did.”

Added to the list announced today, Cook mentioned iOS 6 with hundreds of new features, OS X Mountain Lion, which works with iOS like hand and glove — which is one of iOS’s great advantages over Android — the new iPods recently announced, the new iPhone 5, and the previously announced retina-screen MacBook 15″.

“It’s been an incredible year … a truly prolific year of innovation for Apple,” he said. “We hope you love these products as much as we’ve loved creating them.”

It is a staggering list.

When you look at Apple as a product company, it doesn’t have a huge number of SKUs … four main product families (Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad), perhaps 15 total products within those, and then some 50 or so versions of those products.

Any way you slice it, Apple has refreshed a massive proportion of its product line today. In addition, Apple has done something that it rarely does: Osborn a product. The announced new iMac product line won’t be available until November — the 21.5″ model — and December, for the 27″ version.

It’s impressive chutzpah, based on the capabilities of possibly the most sophisticated supply chain in the business. And it’s an impressive line-up for the holiday shopping season.

At the end, Cook thanked the teams at Apple, “the most talented and innovative people I know.” They’ve done their job. Now it’s time to see how the other titans of the industry — Microsoft and Google — will answer.

We won’t have to wait for long.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple today unveiled a new, larger iPhone 5 as well as a new iPod Touch, iPod Shuffle, and a revamped iTunes aimed at mobile users. It also released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 6.

VentureBeat covered the event live, so scroll down for a reverse-chronological blow-by-blow with all the details. Or check out our iPhone 5 news page and Apple company news page for detailed looks at each product.

Top stories from today’s Apple event:

• The iPhone 5: Apple’s obsessive refinement strikes again with a 4-inch screen, thinner design
• The iPhone 5′s badass camera: 40% faster photo capture, panorama mode, & more
• Siri gets Facebook integration, movie recommendations in iOS 6
• iPhone 5 will include tiny, superfast Lightning connector
• Apple: 84M iPads sold as of June, 400M iOS devices sold to date
• iOS 6 coming September 19
• Apple rolling out redesigned iTunes store for desktop & iOS
• Apple updates iPod Touch, iPod Nano with larger screens and new ‘EarPods‘
• Incredible deal alert: iPhone 4 now free on contract
• Natural Motion shows off cute Clumsy Ninja app on the iPhone 5

Impatient? Visual type of person? Check out all of VentureBeat’s photos from the event in this gallery right here.

11:49 “One of the great things about being here is getting to meet all of these incredible people that are shaping our future. Just like when you get to meet someone like Little Richard or Tom Petty or Jimmy Page, you realize these are just people who took it upon themselves to do something different to change the world and shape our future, but meet them and they’re flesh and bone and they’re just people. This one is dedicated to all those people.” –Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl.

He starts singing My Hero.

11:43 DOOOOOOOD THE FOO FIGHTERS ARE HERE.

They are playing music!

Reporter Meghan Kelly is current acting a fool dancing in her seat.

11:42 Tim Cook, back on stage: “When you look at each of these, they are incredible industry leading innovations by themselves, but what sets them apart and what places Apple way out in front of the competition is how they world so well together.”

“Apple has never been stronger.”

“[Apple employees] are doing the best work of their lives.”

“Now, whenever we have a music event, we like to remind ourselves and our customers of why we do what we do. And there’s no better way to do that than to have one of our favorite musical artists perform.”

[Just once I'd like an Apple exec to say, "These aren't the best we've done. They're pretty good. But the ones before were better." --Farhad Manjoo, @fmanjoo]

11:40 Pricing: iPod Shuffle is $49 for the same 2GB. The iPod nano is $149 for 16GB and the fourth generation iPod Touch will be $199 for a 16Gb device and $249 for the 32GB.

For the new iPod Touch, a 32GB will run you $299 and a 64GB will run you $399.

These are all available in a “Product Red” model, a percentage of the revenue from these are given to fight AIDS in Africa. Thus far, Apple has given $50M.

We’re now watching Apple’s new commercial for the iPod line. Oooh, look at them dancing iPods!

11:38 There are a few ports on the Earpod that let airflow in and out of the acoustic chamber, to help make greater, low frequency sound.

Apple is shipping these as a standalone accessory available today! Apple is including earpods with the nano, touch, and iPhone 5. Sorry, shuffle.

[EarPods: You can hear the 40%+ gross margins perfectly! -- Charlie Kindel @ckindel]

11:35 Let’s take a look at speakers, obviously important for music listening.

Apple is one of the biggest providers of speakers in the world, he says.

New headphones, y’all!

Apple spent three years designing “Earpods.” They look like little eggs you put in your ears.

We’re watching a video of people putting the Earpods in their ears.

Jonathan Ive equates making an earbud to fit every ear like making a shoe to fit every foot. But they looked at a ton of ears and then made something they hope will work.

[From the Twitterverse: I warn you again: every single #iphone5 is a Steve Jobs horcrux. -- BillCorbett ‏@BillCorbett]

Breakout story: Siri gets Facebook integration, movie recommendations in iOS 6

11:33 “For the first time we’ve supporting Siri for the iPod Touch.”

It also comes in colors! Pretty. Okay, we’ve got silver, black, blue, yellow, and red. And each one comes with a color-coordinated wristband.

The iPod shuffle is getting updated with the iPod nano colors as well.

“This is our iPod line for the holidays.”

11:31 More on the iPod Touch: It also has the panorama feature. iPhoto is now available for the iPod Touch too, you can download it from the app store.

There’s a pop out at the bottom of the iPod Touch so you can attach a wrist band.

Apple improved the FaceTime HD camera as well. Not as dramatic.

Bluetooth 4.0 with LE is supported, 802.11 a/b/g/n as well.

Airplay mirroring is also available, so you can take your games from your iPod Touch to your TV using Apple TV.

Breakout story: iPhone 5 will include tiny, super-fast Lightning connector

11:29 There are up to 40 hours of music playback on the iPod Touch as well.

The Apple A6 chip hasn’t made it into the iPod Touch, however. They’re still running the A5. The iPod Touch is, however, getting a new 5 megapixel iSight camera, with the same sapphire crystal lens cover as the iPhone 6.

Breakout story: Incredible deal alert: iPhone 4 now free on contract

11:27 Torsten Rile of Natural Motion comes on stage to show us “Clumsy Ninja” running on the iPod touch.

Okay, he’s super cute. [Ed.: Who: Torsten? Or the ninja?]

Breakout story: iOS 6 coming September 19

11:22 “Next, let’s talk about the iPod touch.”

“We wanted to take everything customers love about the iPod touch and make it even better with an all new fifth generation iPod touch….The best iPod touch we’ve ever made.”

It’s metal, not black, which makes it look less like the iPhone. And it’s 6 mm thin. and 88 grams. “It’s the lightest iPod touch we’ve ever created.”

Graphics are up to 7 times better in this iPod touch as well.

11:20 Craig Joshua is giving us an update on iPod

Over 350M iPods sold to day. “We don’t do this just for the numbers. iPod and music are part of the DNA of the company.”

The iPod nano

“We really wanted to take the opportunity to reinvent the nano.”

“For one, we’d want to give it a really large display. We’d want to have really easy to use controls. We’d want to make it thin and light…and of course, we’d want to give it the latest technologies like the Lightning connector. We’ll that’s just what we did.”

This is the 7th generation of the iPod Nano. It’s 5.4 mm thin, almost 40 percent thinner than the iPod nano it replaces.

“It’s the biggest display we’ve ever put in an iPod nano at 2.5 inches..and it’s a multi-touch display.”

It comes in seven different colors as well. And they color matched the wallpaper to the color of the casing.

There’s an FM tuner that has live pause so you can go back and listen to something that was playing on the radio.

“And we’re bring video back to the iPod nano.”

There’s also a fitness and pedometer built into the nano, making it competitive with devices like the Fitbit and Striiv.

There’s Bluetooth integration as well.

Breakout story: Siri gets Facebook integration, movie recommendations in iOS 6

11:15 There’s a new iTunes mini-player as well, which has a search function of its own.

If you preview a song in the store, the preview will continue playing while you browse other areas of the store. It’s small, but it that’s what’s Apple is all about, small features that make something awesome.

The new iTunes will be available in late October.

11:13 Here’s a picture of the iPhone 5′s internals that Dean took a little while ago.

11:10 You can see photos that artists want to share with you through a new “gallery” feature on albums.

You can see your entire music library and the contents of a playlist you’re creating side-by-side as well. Before, you couldn’t see what was already inside a playlist.

11:07 Here comes Eddy Cue to take us through the iTunes changes.

Over 26M songs are listed on iTunes and customers have purchased and downloaded 2B songs since it was launched. It is now available in 63 countries around the world. There are also over 435 million iTunes accounts.

Two thirds of iTunes downloads come from iOS devices. So they’ve completely redesigned iTunes for iOS. This goes for movies, TV shows, along with songs.

iTunes on your Mac and PC:

Apple built iCloud right into the iTunes on Mac and PC. Jeff Robin is coming on stage now to talk about it.

“We’ve got a beautiful new edge to edge design.”

“When you click on an album, it expands in place, so you can still see all of your other albums on the screen.”

He chose Runaway Baby by Bruno Mars to play for us.

11:05  Current customers can upgrade to iOS 6 for free on September 19.

Tim Cook back on stage.

“In addition to announcing iPhone 5, we have something near and dear to our hearts to talk to you about today and that is music.” – Tim Cook

“Today we are announcing exciting changes with both iPod and iTunes.”

11:00 So, how much will it cost? $199 for a 16GB model, $299 for 32GB and $399 for 64GB.

You can now get an iPhone 4 with 8 GB for free with contract. iPhone 4S for $99, with 16 GB of storage.

You can start to pre-order this Friday, and the iPhone 5 will ship on September 21 in the US, Canada,UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong.

They want to be in 100 countries on 240 carriers.

“This will be our fastest roll out ever.” – Phil Schiller.

10:56 Let’s talk about the design.

They call the aluminum color “slate.” There’s also a white iPhone. Doesn’t look like there are any new colors, folks! (Cue “sad trombone” sound.)

We’re watching a video on the iPhone 5.

It has a matte back with diamond-cut sides that give the product a mirror finish.

“It took all of our learning, our thinking, to realize something so simple, so clear.”–Apple lead designer Jony Ive

Breakout story: The iPhone 5′s badass camera: 40% faster photo capture, panorama mode, & more

10:53 “Siri now knows all about sports!”

He asked her how the 49ers did, and she showed him a table of how the Niners did against the Green Bay Packers. (The answer? Very well.)

Siri will also launch apps for you now.

Siri will also recommend movies to you “based on what others are saying” about those movies. It looks like they’re using Rotten Tomatoes for that information.

If you ask Siri for a restaurant reservation for sushi, she will look for tables at Sushi restaurants around.

You can also dictate Facebook statuses using Siri, because Facebook is integrated into iOS 6!

Apple integrated Facebook into more apps than just Siri, too, but didn’t mention which ones.

FaceTime officially available over cellular data, and not just Wi-Fi.

There are over 200 new features in iOS 6.

10:49 Now we’re talking about the iOS browser Safari.

Safari now has a “full screen mode”.

“iCloud Tabs” shows windows you may have opened on your Mac, so you can open them on your iPhone.

Got special friends in your e-mail? You can mark them as a “VIP” in the mail app. It reminds me of the “important” tab in Gmail.

Let’s look at Passbook@

He shows us a ticket for a concert, a coupon, a gift certificate, and when you’re done? Passbook will “shred” it for you.”

Let’s go back to shared photo stream. He chooses a few photos from his camera role and chooses share photo stream. He titles the stream and it automatically sends it out to your friends’ iPhones. They get a push notification to say, “Hey, someone put some photos on your phone!”

10:43 iOS 6 is alive!

It has been designed from the very beginning to take advantage of this 4-inch display.

Scott Forstall, Apple’s SVP of iOS comes on stage.

Here’s area  few of our new features:

Maps App – “We have built maps from the ground up…to zoom in and out, to rotate around. We’ve also built a search engine in it.”

The engine gives you an info card for the place you’re looking for. It got this data from Yelp.

It also has turn by turn navigation, which Siri’s voice reads off.

At any time you can tap to get an overview and you can follow a small arrow that is constantly moving as you move.

It also works in landscape.

It has a satellite layer, which has a feature called “Fly over” where you can use your finger to see a 360 view of whatever you want in the world, such as Big Ben. You can zoom in, but you’re probably not going to be able to zoom and take a good look in your friend’s apartment window.

Okay, that actually is pretty awesome looking.

10:40 There are three microphones built into the iPhone 5 too. One in the front, one in the back, one on the bottom. There’s a noise canceling earpiece so you can hear your friends without making them yell in your ear.

They have a  new technology to help you sound more natural as well.

(The iPhone 5 definitely has a new back casing as well. There’s what looks like a matte material covering a good majority of the back of the phone.)

Now we’re talking about the port!

It was a 30 pin connector. “So much of what we used to do over the wire is done wirelessly now.”

“It’s time for the connector to evolve. Our new connector is called ‘Lightning.’”

It has an 8 signal design, and is 80 percent smaller! Phil also mentions that it’s more durable.

Bose, JBL, B&O are all compatible with the new connector.

They’ve created a 30 pin-to-Lightning adapter as well.

Glad Apple have solved one of the great 1st-world problems: a docking cable that GOES IN BOTH WAYS. OMFG. Billions of nano-seconds saved! – Julian Rignall ‏@JazRignall

10:36 “The ocean just looks blue on the iPhone 5, kids look happier, and the world is just a more beautiful place.”

“Look at that bee, you can see the veins on the wings of a bee. This camera is tremendous.”

We have a new feature called shared photo streams. You can take photos and automatically share them with friends and family, and they can comment on them.

The biggest change? You can now take panorama photos. You can just sweep your camera across the sceen at the pace the camera tells you to, and it will do the rest.

[iPhone 5’s panorama mode will be so worth it at Wal-Mart. --Mark, @tole_cover]

He shows an image of the Golden Gate Bridge. “This image is 28 megapixels in size.”

It is able to to align your image if you’re not perfectly stable, and removes people or other things that may have gotten in your way while you were sweeping across the screen.

It still takes 1080p HD video. They’ve improved stabilization and face detection for up tot 10 people in the video and you can take stills from the videos.

[Don't pay any attention to the polls over the next week -- they'll be skewed by Obama's iPhone bounce. --Nate Silver, @fivethirtyeight]

10:32 Phil Schiller back on stage!

“It is truly state of the art in the physical and realness it brings.”

They’ve not only matched, but exceeded the battery power of the iPhone 4S.

The camera now has an eight megapixel sensor, 3264×2448, with backside illumination, a hybrid IR filner, five-element lens, and f/2.4 aperture.

“You really see the different in your low light picture.”

Sapphire crystal lens cover to protect the lens. Built into the A6 chip they’ve built a “next generation ISP.” This reduces noise, has a smart filter, better low-light performance, and faster photo capture speeds.

Breakout story: Apple: 84M iPads sold as of June, 400M iOS devices sold to date

10:28 Murray shows us the reflections on the cars, and the fact that there’s enough power to show you your rear view windows on the iPhone 5.

“We used game center to produced one of the coolest new features…time shifted multi-player. I can challenge [a player] one day and he can play me the next.”

“This is something we’ve never seen done before. This is Real Racing 3 for the powerful new iPhone.”

It’s coming to the app store later this year.

So…a smartphone with a big screen that almost takes up the entire front of the phone? I think I smell a lawsuit. –Darren Gladstone, @gizmogladstone

10:26  Other wireless standards: 802.11a/b/g/n, 802.11n 2.4 GHz and 5GHz, up to 150 Mbps available for Wi-Fi in the iPhone 5

We’ve got the A6 chip in this iPhone, and it’s 2 times faster at CPU, 2 times faster for graphics. The chip is 22 percent small as well.

Rob Murray the executive Producer of EA studios heads out to show what they’re doing with the A6 chip.

He’s showing us Real Racing 3 — a video game using the A6 chip.

“The graphics have been built to full console quality.”

Breakout story: The iPhone 5: Apple’s obsessive refinement strikes again with a 4-inch screen, thinner design

10:22 For all those apps that have not been updated, it runs at the same size as the previous iPhones. Apple will center it and place black borders on the sides to hide that it is not as big as the new screen.

Phil shows us the CNN and OpenTable applications to show how developers can update for the iPhone 5.

“Of course movies take advantage of that beautiful widescreen display.”

The iPhone 5 has 44 percent more color saturation than the iPhone 4S display.

They’ve integrated the touch sensors into the display itself, which makes the display 30 percent thinner.

“This truly is the world’s most advanced display.”

Now we’re talking wireless.

Apple added HSPA+, DC-HSDPA and yes, LTE is now available in your iPhone.

There is a single chip and a single radio chip coupled with a dynamic antenna inside the iPhone 5 that make it run on LTE.

Who are they working with to roll out LTE? In the US they are working with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. In Europe they are working with both Deutsche Telkom and a new comer “EE.”

10:17 Phil Schiller coming up on stage now!

Hey Phil!

He mentions all the Apple logos from the computers in the crowd.

“Today, we’re going to introduce iPhone 5!”

The iPhone 5 just came out of the floor on a pedestal. It is slowly turning around like a jewel in a jewelry store.

“It is an absolute jewel.” – Phil

“iPhone 5 is made entriely of glass and aluminum.”

Phile says that say that theehardware and software engineering that has gone into this product is the most challenging this team has ever taken on.

7.6mm thick — world thinnest smartphone. It weights 112 grams. 20 percent lighter than the iPhone 4S

“Can you make a phone that has everything the iPhone 4S has… that is thinner, lighter, smaller.”

The iPhone has a Retina Display and 4 inch screen that is 1136x 640.

“A phone should feel great in your hand…it should fit beautifully in your hand.”

“This display is simply amazing. “

Apple added a fifth row of apps on your screen to fill up the extra space.

Now you can see a full five-day work week in the horizontal view of the calendar.

iWork has been up dated, like Keynote, Pages, Numbers, all take advantage of the display. iPhoto, iMovie, and Garage Band are all updated for the new display as well.

10:15 “Last quarter we sold our 400 millionth iOS device. This is amazing! No one could have predicted this.”

“Today we’re taking it to the next level, making a huge leap. We have some very exciting news.”

From Russ Pitts of Polygon: Chuck Norris says if you don’t buy iPhone 5, there will be 1,000 years of no cell service. #fakeapple

10:10 84M iPads sold through June.

“Our competitors have taken notice of this,” Cook says.

iPad had a 62% marketshare last year, this year it has a 68% share.

“iPad accounts for 91% of the web traffic of all tablets! I don’t know what these other tablets are doing!”

“They must be in warehouses or on store shelves or maybe in someone’s bottom drawer!”

94% of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPads.

“And they’re investing in custom apps.”

He mentions Mayo Clinic and Ducati are creating business apps.

“The app store is the place for all of us.”

700,000+ apps in the store now. 250,000 are specifically iPad apps

“Believe it or not, every app seems to have its fan, or fans.”

90% of all apps are downloaded each month. Average customer using over 100 apps.

[The iPhone 5 is infectious and spreading fast! #plagueinc #keynote #iphone5 -- Plague, Inc., a plague-management sim. ‏@NdemicCreations.]

10:08 “Our notebooks now rank number one in the US in marketshare for the last three months,” Cook says.

“Over the last year the Mac has significantly outgrown the PC, and it’s not just the last year. For the last 6 years straight, the Mac has grown significantly faster than the PC.”

“The iPad is driving the post PC revolution at a breathtaking pace.”

Sold 17M iPad last quarter, setting an all new record for iPad sales.

More iPads sold than any PC manufacturer sold of any PC line, claims Cook.

10:06 Tim Cook is talking about Apple’s retail growth: 380 stores around the world operating  in 12 countries. Opening their first store in Sweden on Friday.

83M visitors to retails stores last quarter.

Now he’s talking about Mountain Lion.

7M copies of Mountain Lion downloaded. The best selling Mac OS yet.

10:04 They’re showing a store in Barcelona on the screen. They used limestone from the local quary to restore it. “No one would have done this but Apple,” Cook says. “It’s one of our largest stores in the world.”

Video playing: Scenes of Barcelona are playing. It is pretty. We’re looking at the Apple Store interior and fans waving.

Screaming Apple employees!

High fives! You just got a new iPhone, Barcelona customer!

10:00 The event has begun. Tim Cook is on stage.  “It’s an amazing time at Apple. An extraordinary time.”

9:45 VentureBeat’s Dean “the Machine” Takahashi is also on the scene with me.

9:40 Here’s another view of the crowd.

9:35 Here’s what the crowd outside the Yerba Buena center looks like. Journalists! Everywhere I look, journalists!

8:35 Alright, everybody, let’s confirm some iPhone 5 rumors.

We’re here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Calif. waiting for the Apple event to start. If you don’t know what Apple event we’re talking about, then kudos, somehow you’ve managed to stay off the Internet for the last six months. Check out this run down of what we expect to see here.

Apple’s own website spilled some major details from the event this morning, revealing the iPhone 5 name, LTE connectivity, and that we’ll see a new iPod Touch and iPod Nano later today.

For the rest of you waiting with bated breath for a shiny new phone, apps, and operating system, check back here at 10am Pacific time. We’ll be live-blogging the event with all the iPhone 5 (and maybe iOS 6) details. Until then, happy speculating!

All photos by VentureBeat, unless otherwise noted

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A number of Macbook Pro and Macbook Air owners are reporting that the Mountain Lion OS X upgrade is behaving like a (non-sparkling) vampire by sucking the life out of their machine’s battery.

Users reporting the abnormally fast battery power drain started cropping up on Apple’s support forum soon after the new OS was made available on July 25. Forum users have said their machine’s battery life is about half as much as it was prior to installing Mountain Lion, which was evident when monitoring the battery life utility.

Apple, however, has just recently started contacting users to investigate the issue, reports Ars Technica. Apple support reps are asking users to log their machine for data and system information that could identify what the problem is. Right now there are only theories for the battery power drain problems, and Apple has yet to release a time frame for when it could be fixed.

I did some testing with my Macbook Pro and did notice that the battery drained faster than usual. Others on the VentureBeat staff haven’t noticed much of a change.

Is your Macbook Pro or Air experiencing rapid battery drain? Let us know in the comments.

The operating system has topped 3 million App Store downloads since last week’s launch, Apple announced today. This makes it the most successful OS for the Cupertino, Calif. Mac maker’s history. The news comes days after hearing that Mountain Lion represented 3 percent of all Mac Internet traffic, as VentureBeat previously reported.

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

Along with tighter integration with Apple’s iOS, the new OS is tightly tied to Twitter. In today’s announcement, Apple said Facebook integration would come in an “upcoming” software update of Mountain Lion. The OS also includes many features first seen in iOS, like a notification center, built-in social networking support, iMessage, and voice dictation. Today’s announcement only confirms what others were saying after the $20 Mountain Lion upgrade became available: the new OS is on track to be the best version of  OS X, bringing Apple $38 million and climbing in new revenue.

Apple’s just-launched Mountain Lion operating system has already seen widespread adoption among Mac users and accounts for 3 percent of Mac web traffic around the globe, AllThingsD reports.

Mountain Lion is an incremental OS update from Lion with 200 new features (read our hands on), but because it costs just $20 to upgrade, it’s a no-brainer for those already running Lion. Not only is the cost low, but Apple has made it positively easy to upgrade by downloading the OS through the Mac App Store.

Thanks to the low price and making it easy to download, Mountain Lion accounts for 3 percent of Mac web traffic just 48 hours after launch, Web tracking firm Chitika claims.

Chitika says that based on the 66 million Mac users Apple claims it has, it can infer 2.1 million Mac owners have already upgraded to Mountain Lion. If 90 percent of those users paid, Mountain Lion has generated $38 million in revenue so far.

Based on these impressive numbers, we wonder if Apple wishes it had started offering cheap and easy-to-download upgrades several OSes ago. Microsoft no doubt took notice of Apple’s successful Lion upgrade option last time, since its Windows 8 will cost just $40 to upgrade.

Mountain Lion photo: California Department of Fish and Game/Flickr

As someone who’s still recovering from the upgrade to Lion, upgrading to Mountain Lion was a frightening prospect. While exciting, operating system updates are to me like the first day of school: lots of new faces, and few of them are friendly.

Mountain Lion, however, is a graceful host: Its changes are minor ones, and from what I can tell, most of them are easy to turn off.  Apple has good reason for only charging Mac users $20 for the software: Mountain Lion is an iterative upgrade, and one whose features are both welcome, and, in some cases, really damn impressive.

So does Mountain Lion roar, or does it just meow?

A smooth and easy upgrade

The days of disk upgrades are long gone for Apple — and Mac users are all the better off because of it. Like its predecessor, Mountain Lion is only available for download via the App Store, a feature that makes for a smooth and easy upgrade. While the 4.05 gigabyte file takes a while to download, the actual installation process only takes a half hour, and once it’s done, your Mac will go right back to its pre-update state. It’s a pleasant experience.

With that, let’s jump into a few of the features.

Notification Center is quiet. Too quiet

Notification Center is the new home to all of your OS X notifications, but for me it was home to very little at first.

I went through roughly an hour of using Mountain Lion before I got a notification — and it was one that I had intentionally set myself as a test. This, for me, was a good thing, as the fewer notifications I get from my computer, the happier (generally) I am. I was a bit confused with the Mountain Lion notifications because I assumed that I would be flooded with them until I selectively disabled the ones I didn’t want to get. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case.

As an aside, while you can access the Notification Center via its icon on the Menu Bar, I found it works best when used in conjunction with a keyboard shortcut like Shift + →.

Read my lips: Dictation is damn great

I’m generally skeptical of voice recognition software, but Apple’s Dictation has made me a believer. As with Siri, Dictation is both accurate and easy-to-use. Available from any program with text input, you enable Dictation by pressing the function key twice, and you dismiss it by pressing the function key one more time.

What’s most amazing about Dictation is that in addition to words, it also recognizes commas, periods, and exclamation marks (just say, “exclamation mark”). This may not be a big deal for those who have been using Siri for a while, but if you haven’t used any dictation software recently it’s a startling upgrade.

One thing to keep in mind is that like your sixth-grade English teacher, Dictation demands clarity of pronunciation, so it’s useful to speak slowly and clearly if you want the software to understand you. Speaking too quickly or mumbling will inevitably result in you having to go back and edit what Dictation came up with. (Apple says that the more you use Dictation, the smarter it gets. We’ll see if this holds true as time goes on.)

Also, as the screenshot above shows, Dictation, like Siri, requires an Internet connection, and all the things you say into it will be sent to Apple to improve the software. So if you are someone who is uncomfortable with that idea, don’t use Dictation.

These things aside, Dictation is by far my favorite feature in Mountain Lion. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that, while I’m not sure that upgrading to Mountain Lion is completely necessary, the price tag of the new software is more than justified by Dictation alone.

(The above section was written entirely using Dictation, which goes to show you just how powerful the software is.)

Reminders reminds, and take note of Notes

Two features that should be familiar to iOS users are Notes and Reminders, both of which do exactly what their names say. Reminders is a simple to-do list application that’s bolstered by the ability to notify you at a certain time or location, the latter of which obviously requires letting the application have access to your location settings.

Notes is similarly straightforward, and, like Reminders, can be synced over iCloud for use on your other iOS devices.

What about everything else? 

While there are over 200 new features in Mountain Lion, not a huge number of them are worth spending too much time talking about.  AirPlay mirroring, for instance, is a big deal for anyone who has an Apple TV, but I’m not one of those people. This is the same reason iCloud is a snooze to me:  My only Apple device is my Macbook, so I have no big need for most of what iCloud has to offer. Clearly, Apple is making a big play for the ecosystem with Mountain Lion.

PowerNap is also the kind of feature that’s hard to get excited about — which is exactly the idea. The software keeps you computer up-to-date even while it’s in Sleep mode, so it’s by definition a feature that’s almost entirely invisible. If PowerNap is doing its job, you won’t even know it exists.

To be brief

Mountain Lion is, in all, a solid upgrade to OS X, though if you’re like me, you could live without a lot of what’s new here. Still, features like Dictation and the Notification Center carry the OS, and for $20, there’s little to lose by upgrading.

This morning Apple released it’s latest update to OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion, along with a form for new Mac purchasers who were promised the upgraded operating system for free with their purchase. The form, which you can fill out here, is broken and is currently not allowing users to submit tickets for the free download. Update – read the update below for the fix.

I called up Apple technical support to see what the issue was regarding the MacBook Air I received for testing (see our MacBook Air review here), and they found an identical issue regarding the form’s “Number of Qualifying Systems for Right to Copy” selection. As you can see in the image to the right (click to enlarge), the web page won’t allow users to continue filling out the form past that step.

The technical support representative found the same problem on multiple machines in their service center, saying, “I can’t load it on my computer, my co-worker’s computer, or my manager’s computer.” His official statement regarding the issue is that it is likely from the overload of users attempting to download Mountain Lion, but that doesn’t make sense since Apple’s website is an entirely different system from the App Store, where users actually download the upgrade.

At the same time, I was told that a support ticket was submitted, which adds further credibility to the claim that something else may be causing the error.

I’ve reached out to Apple for a comment, and will continue reporting until the form is fixed and users can properly install OS X Mountain Lion on their new machines. To try it yourself, click here for a direct link (US only) or go to Apple.com, scroll down to the “OS X Mountain Lion is here” link, scroll down again to “Get a free upgrade with your new Mac,” then choose between the two purchase date periods.

Update

As our astute commenters pointed out, the “Number of Qualifying Systems for Right to Copy” selection is only for Enterprise, Education, or Government users. To properly confirm your free upgrade, do not select that option (Right to Copy) and simply continue on after checking the “I accept the terms and conditions…” at the bottom. That will move you forward to the personal information and system data for the upgrade. After completing the process, you’ll receive a confirmation code, though email confirmations aren’t being sent out immediately.

This means that individuals will be able to get a confirmation of update, likely within the next 24 hours. Enterprise, education, and government users can’t upgrade because of this problem as of yet. It’s also strange that Apple would have such poor documentation on the update form; not only did this writer miss it, but so did Apple’s own technical support. I expect plenty of users to make that mistake as well, so the article above will remain unchanged. Updates for enterprise users will appear below.

Mountain Lion photo: USFWS Mountain-Prairie/Flickr

You can now finally get your hands on Apple’s latest version of OS X, Mountain Lion, on the Mac App Store for $19.99.

Apple announced that it would be releasing the OS today as part of its earnings release yesterday, after previously promising that it would be released in July.

Good luck getting the OS up and running anytime soon, though. It took me about 15 minutes to successfully purchase Mountain Lion from the App Store, thanks to the hordes of Mac owners trying to update at the same time. The update itself is also 4.05 gigabytes, so it’ll likely take you a while to download it.

Remember that if you’ve purchased a Mac computer on or after June 11, you can get a free upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Unlike last year’s OS X Lion release, this update will only be available for download via the Mac App Store. Just like Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion is an incremental update, more than a completely revamped OS. (That’s why it’s so cheap.)

Mountain Lion brings over many features first seen in iOS, like a notification center, built-in social networking support, iMessage, and voice dictation.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s been 10 days since Russian hacker Alexey Borodin unleashed hell for Apple with his iOS in-app purchasing exploit. But after successfully countering some of Apple’s attempts to shut him down, Borodin is calling it quits on his iOS hack. Instead, he’s going to focus more on his Mac OS X exploit, unveiled over the weekend.

“By examining Apple’s last statement about in-app purchases in iOS 6, I can say that currently game is over,” Borodin wrote in a blog post, referring to Apple’s fix for developers against his exploit. “Currently we have no way to bypass updated APIs. It’s good news for everyone, we have updated security in iOS, developers have their air-money.”

Borodin went on to say that he will continue running his iOS exploit service until iOS 6 comes out. Apple has offered developers early access to some APIs to secure their in-app purchases, but it won’t be able to widely fix Borodin’s exploit until iOS 6 is released.

He hinted that he has something in store for Apple’s Mac OS X app store. That exploit is similar to the iOS in-app hack, but it also requires a separate app called “Grim Receiper” to function. Apple hasn’t yet responded to Borodin’s OS X hack, but I would imagine that it would be tougher to fix, since the desktop OS is more open than iOS.

As I’ve written previously, Borodin is taking advantage of Apple’s shortsightedness when it comes to in-app purchases. Instead of tying purchases directly to customer accounts or devices, Apple’s in-app purchase receipts can be easily reused with Borodin’s method, as ZDNet’s Emil Protalinski points out. On iOS, Apple also sent customers’ Apple IDs and passwords in plain text, which could allow the hacker to easily collect login credentials. It’s unclear if that’s the case for the Mac exploit.

Via The Next Web

While Apple was hard at work coming up with a fix for Russian hacker Alexey Borodin’s iOS in-app purchasing exploit, the wily hacker has unveiled a similar exploit for in-app purchases on Mac OS X.

The latest hack, which affects OS X 10.7 and above (earlier versions don’t support in-app purchases), also relies on tricking Apple’s very basic receipt system for in-app purchases.

Borodin’s latest exploit method doesn’t differ too much from his original iOS hack: You simply need to install two system certificates, change your DNS settings to point to his server, and use a new app call “Grim Receiper.” The app is the only unique element of the Mac OS X hack, and it serves to keep track of receipts for you to reuse, according to Borodin.

Basically, Borodin is taking advantage of Apple’s shortsightedness when it comes to in-app purchases. Instead of tying purchases directly to customer accounts or devices, Apple’s in-app purchase receipts can be easily reused with Borodin’s method, as ZDNet’s Emil Protalinski points out. On iOS, Apple also sent customers’ Apple IDs and passwords in plain text, which could allow the hacker to easily collect login credentials. It’s unclear if that’s the case for the Mac exploit.

Apple last night announced that iOS 6 will fix Borodin’s iOS hack, and earlier this week it started attaching unique device IDs (UDIDs) to in-app purchase receipts. For now, developers need to authenticate in-app purchase receipts before they get sent to Apple’s servers.

Apple initially tried to cut off Borodin from its servers using his IP address and urged his ISP to shut down his website. As VentureBeat’s security guru Meghan Kelly tells it, Borodin was eventually able to relaunch his website via an off-shore ISP and figured out another way to steal in-app purchases without using the App Store.

We’re interested in seeing where this game of cat and mouse goes. We’ve dropped a line to Apple for further comment on the news.

Borodin is now accepting donations via Bitcoin, after PayPal stopped accepting donations to him.

Apple showed off a handful of new features in its forthcoming desktop operating system, OS X Mountain Lion 10.8, at its annual developers conference (WWDC) today.

The latest operating system takes great care to integrate communication into the daily workflow of activities people experience while on a Mac. Basically, these tasks are handled by third-party applications, which can either seem overwhelming or inadequate when you get entrenched with work. iMessages has been integrated, allowing you to directly respond to people using what looks like a panel from the right side of the screen (see photo below). You can even respond to text messages using this new functionality.

The other big thing Apple did in this OS is add a Notification center. Apple said in the past, each application had its own way of doing notifications. It would either bake in its own method or use a service like Growl — something the company calls disruptive. The new notification center, by contrast, is consistent and elegant. Banners slide down from the top of the screen. If you ignore them, they’re easily hidden. You can recall them with a two-finger swipe on a touch pad. As for alerts, they stay around until you dismiss them explicitly, but this is something you can switch off if you’re getting overwhelmed. Switching to a projector or display mode will turn the notifications off automatically.

The company touted new integration with iCloud, which is also getting a pleasant update that includes the ability to let your applications update while you sleep, Mac to Apple TV seamless Airplay screen sharing, and way more.

Apple is offering current users with OS X Lion installed a super low price of $20 to upgrade to Mountain Lion. The new OS will “ship” in July.

We’ve outlined some of the other features mentioned during the event below:

• 6 million Mac users now.
• 40% are using OS X Lion, the last OS update.
• Interface is optimized for multi-touch track pads and mice.
• 200 new features, total.
• New notes app in Mountain lion as well.
• “The really huge update on here is messages… We brought iMessage to the mac.
• You can respond to a phone message from the Mac.
• Brand new notification center is coming in OS X Mountain Lion.
• Voice Dictation is also coming to the Mac.
• Support for Twitter is built right into the OS.
• New version of Safari featuring enhanced sharing.
• Power Nap, app updating feature.
• Desktop to Apple TV airplay screen sharing.
• Mountain Lion is $19.99 to upgrade from OS X Lion
• Available in July 2012

This post is developing. Please refresh the page for the latest updates.

Photo by Heather Kelly. Additional reporting by Dean Takahashi.

Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicks off today with a keynote address from CEO Tim Cook and company. This year, Apple is expected to make announcements about  iOS 6, Mountain Lion, iCloud, and fresh Mac and MacBook hardware. (Check out our full round-up of predictions.)

VentureBeat reporters Dean Takahashi, Dylan Tweney, and Heather Kelly will be reporting  live from the keynote at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco starting at 10:00AM Pacific time. We’ll be updating this page with news and photos as it happens. We’ll also be tweeting from the event here, and following up with more in-depth articles on the announcements here.

Here are some of the biggest announcements from today’s keynote:

• Apple introduces thinner MacBook Pro with Retina Display
• Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion has 200 new features, including Power Nap, dictation, notification center, & more<
• iOS 6 revealed: Better Siri w/ iPad support, Facebook integration, & more
• Apple updates Siri for iOS6: cars, languages, games, sports, and yes, iPad!
• Apple takes its maps to new heights: free navigation, 3D, & more
• New MacBook Air powers up with Ivy Bridge processors and a 512GB SSD
• iOS devs earned $2.5B from apps year over year
• Non-Retina-display Macbook Pro adds in quad-core processors, USB 3.0

10:01am – Apple kicks off the event with a Siri video — Siri’s got jokes! “I am excited about the new Samsung. Not the phone: The refrigerator.”

10:02am - Tim Cook hits the stage. “This is our 23rd WWDC. Yes, it’s older than many of you are. This is the longest-running developer conference that we know of anywhere,” he said. This year’s WWDC sold out in 1 hour and 45 minutes — versus 8 days for last year’s conference.

Cook says that Apple now has over 650,000 apps in the App Store, 225,000 of which has been designed specifically for the iPad. Customers have now downloaded about 30 billion apps, and Apple has paid out more than $5 billion to app developers.

“There are such heartwarming stories out there, of what the combination of our incredible devices and your amazing apps have made in people’s lives,” Cook said. He paused, looked down, and looked emotional as he said that last line.

10:10am -A video starts playing, in which a blind man with a German accent is using an iPhone app to walk through a forest. “People write me from around the world, saying ‘You have changed my life,’” the developer of the app for blind people says.

Now there are kids learning anatomy in a classroom in India. Next, the video highlights someone who owns a tiny treehouse in the woods in Vermont, which they rent out using AirBnB on their iPhone.

“Apple makes it so easy for designers like us, for engineers like us, to stretch our imagination,” the Airbnb CEO says in the video.

Now they’re showing a cute little kid with speech development issues using an iPad to learn how to communicate. “iOS is so intuitive for anyone to use, regardless of age,” the developer says. [OMG barf. There's a a bunch of people saying "Thank you" to various app developers.]

Enter, new MacBooks

10:16am – Now Cook is back on stage. “On behalf of Apple, we would like to thank everyone in the developer community for the incredible apps you’ve done for us. Thank you.” He introdcues Phil Schiller, to discuss some “exciting changes in our notebook lineup.”

Here comes the news: First about the MacBook Air, which will once again be available in 11-inch and 13-inch sizes. It will feature a third gen Intel Core processor (Ivy Bridge) and will sport up to a 2.0GHz dual-core i7 chip, with Intel Turbo Boost to 3.2GHz, and up to 8GB of 1600MHz memory. You can now install up to 512GB of flash drive storage, running at speeds up to 500 Mbps (SATA 3). They’re also adding USB 3.0, with USB 3/USB 2 ports on both sides (each port works with both types of USB). It will also get a 720p HD webcam.

It’ll cost you $999 and $1,099 for the 11-inch MacBook Airs, and $1,199 and $1,499 for the 13-inchers. Both models are shipping today.

Next up, the MacBook Pro: They’ll offer Ivy Bridge processors up to 2.7GHz on most models, as well as a quad-core i7 on the larger, 15-inch model. The MacBook Pros can be equipped with up to 8GB of 1600MHz memory, and discrete Nvidia graphics is also an option (Apple claims it’s 60% faster than last year’s). Both models also have USB 3.

The MacBook Pros will be priced at $1,199 or $1,499 for the 13-inch model, and $1,799 or $2,199 for the 15-inch model. Both will also be shipping today.

“Nobody turns over their entire line as quickly or as completely as we do,” Schiller said.

Now the slide reveals a black cloth-covered mystery computer. (The crowd cheers. They like secrets.)

10:25am – “You want a next-generation MacBook Pro to have a killer display…. You want it to be radically thin and light. You want to make something unlike any other notebook today,” Schiller said. “It’s the most beautiful computer we’ve ever made.”

Video on the screen shows that it’s very thin — lower part of the computer’s body is thinner than Schiller’s finger. Nice visual effect there: The black background made it look as if it were a rendering, but it was actually a video of the real computer onstage.

This new MacBook Pro is 0.71 inch thick — only a little thicker than a MacBook Air — and 4.46 pounds. It sports a 15.1 Retina Display with an astounding 2,880 x 1,800 resolution.From a normal working distance, your retina cannot discern individual pixels. The screen is 220 pixels per inch, with 5,184,000 pixels — “the world’s highest-resolution notebook display,” Schiller said.

The new display uses IPS technology for wide viewing angles, and reduced glare by up to 75 percent. It offers deeper blacks and brighter colors, Schiller says.

Lion applications have been updated to take advantage of the display, including Mail, Safari, iMovie, and iPhoto. Final Cut Pro is also being updated: You can now fit a 1080p video at full resolution in the upper right of the screen, with “over 3 million pixels left over” for timeline, video effects, thumbnails, etc.

Apps need to be updated to take advantage of the Retina display – if not, they can be pixel-doubled. Adobe is working on an updated, Retina-ready version of PhotoShop. Autodesk is working on a new version of Autodesk. And game developers are working on this too, including Blizzard for Diablo III.

“Everything inside this Macbook Pro has been redesigned,” Schiller said. The inside is symmetrical, black, minimalistic. It looks like they’ve covered all the logos and chip identifiers. There’s a huge, odd-shaped array of batteries, and what looks like two fans.

The new Macbook Pro sports up to 16GB of RAM, GeForce GT 650M processor (from Nnidia) with up to 1GB of video RAM, and up to 768GB of flash drive storage. It has up to 7 hours of battery life and up to 30 days of standby time. Ports include an SD slot, HDMI (full-sized), USB 3/2 (one on each side), a new, thinner MagSafe 2 plug, and two Thunderbolt ports. The laptop also has a backlit keyboard, 802.11n Wi-Fi. Bluetooth 4.0. HD Facetime camera, dual microphones, and nice speakers.

Schiller touts a few new Thunderbolt devices, and shows off a FireWire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet adapter for Thunderbolt.

10:37am – Now they’re rolling a video. It starts with Jony Ive, naturally.

“To create it, we rigorously questioned the ways we designed and built our portable products in the past,” Jony Ive says in a video.

For instance, the blades on the cooling fans are positioned irregularly (Ive says “asymmetrically”) in order to spread the fan noise across several frequencies, making it less noticeable. (That’s just insane. What’s next? Bespoke aluminum, hand-milled from organic Nepali aluminum miners?)

Pricing for the new MacBook Pro starts at $2,199, and it also starts shipping today.

“And that concludes our notebook lineup,” Schiller says. “It’s simply the best computer apple has ever made.”

OS X Mountain Lion, revealed

10:44am - Craig Federighi comes onstage to talk about OS X. There have been 26 million copies of OS X shipped to date — Apple’s best seller yet. 40 percent of OS X users are running Lion (after 9 months) — by comparison, Windows 7 took 27 months to get to the same level.

He formally announced OS X Mountain Lion, with an interface optimized for multitouch trackpads and mice, as well as easier integration with other devices. There are more than 200 new features, and he’s going to detail 8 of them.

First: iCloud. Several new apps in Mountain Lion, including Messages, Reminders, and Notes, will bring your documents to iCloud. There’s also a new app caled Documents in the Cloud, that will let you access other docs through Apple’s cloud storage service. “It provides a simple new way to access and organize your documents,” Federighi says.

Newest documents appear at the top, and all docs are available across all your devices. Docs in the Cloud works with Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Preview, TextEdit.

The Reminders app now supports multitouch for paging through your reminders, new animations. The Mountain Lion Notes app syncs with your iPad notes. Not surprisingly, the Messages app brings iMessage to the Mac, so you can respond from wherever you are, and your conversations are all available on your Mac, too.

Federighi describes the new Notifications Center as, “A consistent, elegant system based on banners and alerts.” Banners slide down into the upper right corner, just like Growl messages. After they go away, you can bring them back with a two-finger swipe from the right side of your trackpad. There will also be alerts, which function just like banners, except they stick around until dismissed.

Mountain Lion also sports built-in dictation and sharing features. There’s a “share” button in the toolbar in Safari (and other apps presumably), so you can share things to different services. It works in Preview, or you do it from “quick look” in any app that supports that. Sharing is built right into the OS, so you can enter your login (to mail, Twitter, Flickr, etc) from System Preferences.

10:54am – Ferighi calls the new Safari, “The fastest browser engine on the planet.” There’s a new unified search/URL bar, just like Chrome. You can just start typing, and it will autosuggest search phrases as well as items from your history and favorites. There’s an “iCloud” button on the toolbar. Click it, and it shows you a list of all the pages you have open in browsers on all of your devices.

A new tabbed interface supports multitouch gestures in Safari. You can also zoom in with multitouch (like in Lion). But if you zoom further out, you see all your open tabs and you can swipe between them, then pinch to zoom in on the one you want.

Slick feature here: There’s a quick-access “Tweet sheet” in notification center, so you can post a tweet. Federighi shows off by using Dictation to compose a tweet there.

A new feature called “Power Nap” fetches your email, calendar updates, and even syncs your photo stream while your Mac is sleeping. It Can also back itself up to Time Capsule and download/install system updates. “It’s operation is entirely silent … and easy on your battery,” Federighi says.

With AirPlay Mirroring, the Airplay menu now lets you select any nearby Apple TV and mirror your Mac’s screen at 1080p resolution. You also can send audio to AirPlay-enabled stereos and speakers.

Game Center, obviously, brings the iOS Game Center to the Mac. Uses the same account you might already have on iOS. It supports both turn-based and head-to-head gaming across Mac/iOS platforms.

11:06am – Time for another demo: A white-suited racecar driver with a helmet named Racer OS X comes onstage. He’s showing off CSR Racing.

Next they showed off a handful of other features, really quickly, including: Gatekeeper (anti-malware), Offline Reading List (in Safari — a read later feature). For developers, there are 1,700 new APIs. In China, there’s a new Pinyin input method, a Chinese dictionary, 8 new fonts, and sharing support for Sina, Youku, Tudou.

Mountain Lion will be coming to customers next month, via the Mac App Store for $19.99. That’s an upgrade price for anyone with Snow Leopard or more recent, and that single purchase will work across all of your Macs. Developers are getting a Developer Preview version today.

Everything you ever wanted to know about iOS 6

11:10am – Next up: Scott Forstall hits the stage for an update on iOS. He says there are over 365 million iOS devices shipped. Over 80 percent are running iOS 5.

84 of the top 100 social apps are pushing notifications via Notification Centers, he boasts. They’ve sent more than 1.5 trillion push notifications for these apps. 140 million iMessage users have sent more than 150 billion messages, more than 1 billion per day.

Twitter has seen a 3x growth in iOS users since integration, who have sent 10 billion tweets, Forstall said. 47 percent of Twitter’s shared photos come from iOS 5. There are now 130 million accounts on Game Center, with 5 billion score updates per week.

“I’m very happy to announce iOS 6,” Forstall eventually said. It offers over 200 new features, including improvements to Siri like sports awareness. You can ask “What was the score of the last Giants game?”, or “What is Buster Posey’s batting average?” The result shows a stats card.

Siri knows about baseball, basketball, football. Someone asks “Who is taller: LeBron, or Kobe?”

Siri also sports Open Table support, as well as better restaurant data, including average pricing, reviews, etc — via a partnership with Yelp.

“Siri’s become something of a movie buff,” Forstall says. New integration with Rotten Tomatoes includes integrated trailer playing (and likely reviews, and help movie showtimes). Siri can launch apps now too. “Play Temple Run,” and Siri launches it immediately.

There’s a new feature called “Eyes Free,” part of a a partnership with a number of car manufactures. A finger on a steering wheel button can bring up Siri (while your phone remains docked, and the screen remains dark). Car companies working with Apple include BMW, GM, Mercedes, Audi, Toyota, GM, Honda, Land Rover, and Jaguar.

Apple is adding Siri support for a bunch of languages and countries, including Korean, Mandarin (for Taiwan), Cantonese (for Hong Kong) and Mandarin or Cantonese for mainland China. This includes local search support “around the world” and in native languages.

Finally, Siri is coming to the iPad.

11:26am – Next up: Facebook integration. “We are integrating Facebook right into iOS 6.” You can log in through settings, and apps can then access your login for posting photos, locations, updates, etc.

Facebook is also integrated into the notification center, and you can tap to update Twitter or Facebook from within Notification Center. As part of the integration, the iOS API gives apps access to Facebook, your contact list also syncs with your friends’ contact information from Facebook, and Facebook events and birthdays appear in your calendar. (The same integration also appears in Mountain Lion on the Mac.)

There have also been some useful Phone application updates. The popup menu when you receive a call now includes a “remind me later” option so you can remind yourself to return incoming calls. A new “Do not disturb” option turns off notification of push notifications, text messages, phone calls — although you can designate exceptions to who can call you. There’s a “repeated calls” option so you can allow someone to get through if they call twice in under 3 minutes.

11:35am – FaceTime now works over cellular data connections, Apple confirmed. Facetime now links your Apple ID and your phone number, so if someone calls your phone number, you can take the call or reply to messages on your iPad or your Mac.

Two-thirds of all mobile web traffic comes from mobile Safari, Forstall says. Safari in iOS 6 adds ability to view open tabs on other devices (including your Mac), and the Offline Reading List feature. You can also upload photos from within Safari to sites like Shutterfly.

“Smart app banners” let websites display a banner to notify visitors about a native app. A single click takes you right into the App Store to install the app. If they have the app installed, Safari can pass data to the app so you can switch to the app and pick up where you were on the corresponding website.

Your Photostream can now be shared in iOS 6. You can check the photos you want to share, and choose friends from your address book. Friends receive a push notification, and your photos then appear in a shared album in their Photos app. Can also be viewed on a Mac, Apple TV, or web browser.

The Mail app has also received some nice updates. A new “VIP” feature lets you mark someone as an important person. When you get an email from a VIP person, you get a notification on the lock screen, just as if they’d sent you a text message. There’s also a special “VIP” mailbox for access to those messages. You can more easily insert photos and video, and you can open and view office documents within Mail.

Passbook, a new feature to iOS 6, consolidates passes, like airline boarding passes, Starbucks card, QR codes, and movie theater confirmation emails. Templates make it easy for developers to work with this. Passbook integrates into the lock screen, so it pops up on the lock screen at the right time. Unlock the phone, and there’s the QR code. Passbook has geolocation features, too, so if you walk by your favorite Starbucks, the app lets you know.

Forstall then introduced Guided Access, a new feature that allows you to circle controls with your finger that you want to disable, in any app. You can also disable the home button, so it keeps you in the app.

“We’ve been surprised by the number of children with autism who have been flocking to our devices, especially the iPad,” Forstall said.

Guided Access is also useful for schools that might want to lock an iPad-based test onto the screen, so kids can’t go to Safari to look up the answers.

Finally, Apple announces its own iOS Maps app

11:52am -”We have built an entirely new mapping system from the ground up, and it is beautiful,” Forstall said.

Apple’s long-awaited Map app offers worldwide coverage, all with Apple’s own cartography. 100 million business listings around the world are already included for local search (with Yelp integration). Apple is also building a traffic service, which not only shows slow areas but also includes little icons to show incident reports. The traffic functionality utilizes anonymous, realtime data from iOS users to keep the data updated.

Apple’s new Maps app will also include turn-by-turn navigation. Navigation will update ETAs based on traffic, and will reroute you if necessary. It’s also accessible via the lock screen, and is integrated with Siri.

“Are we there yet?” Siri answers: “Relax and enjoy the drive. You’ll be there in 14 minutes.”

The Maps app will also sport a new “Flyover” feature. Apple has been flying over metro areas in helicopters and planes to build 3D models and HD imagery. Maps are all vector-based images, so zooming and rotation is really fast. The app includes pop-up info cards on points of interest, as well as a quick 3D view.

The Flyover view is pretty cool: Pick a spot, and it renders a 3D photographic view that lets you zoom around and fly over that point.

The demo shows why Apple wanted to build its own maps application: This is faster and better-looking than any other maps app I’ve seen, plus it has the characteristic easy-to-use Apple UI and excellent integration with Siri.

Wrapping up, Forstall notes that all the OS X features for China are included in iOS 6 as well.

A beta of iOS 6 is available to developers today. It will ship this Fall, will support the iPhone 3GS and later, the 2nd and 3rd generation iPad, and the 4th generation iPod Touch.

Wrapping up

Now Tim Cook returns to the stage. (To enthusiastic cheers.) He recaps the day’s news: new Retina-display-sporting MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion, and iOS 6.

“Only Apple could make such amazing hardware, software, and services,” Cook said. “We are so proud of these products, because they are perfect examples of what Apple does best.”

This is why people come to work with Apple, he says: “To do the very best work of their lives… and to make a difference to so many people around the world. The products that we make, combined with the apps that you make, can fundamentally change the world.”

“I can’t think of a better reason for getting up in the morning,” Cook concludes.

And that’s a wrap.

New MacBook Air powers up with Ivy Bridge processors and a 512GB SSD

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Found is a neat new Mac application that wants to be like OS X’s Spotlight, but for all the files you have stored across cloud services, including Dropbox, Google Docs, and Gmail. Currently in beta, Found is aiming for a mid-May release in the Mac App Store, where it will be free.

“We wanted to step back and say, what are some of the basic problems people have had with their search?” said Found co-founder Stephen Brady in an interview. He and his partner, Vijay Sundaram, decided the fragmentation of files across multiple devices and cloud services was a big issue today, one that could be solved with a single application.

The concept is simple: Need to find that photo of your cat wearing a bow tie, but don’t know if it’s in one of your three Gmail accounts, on your desktop, or in a Dropbox folder? Double click the Control button or click on the Found icon (it’s a titled F, not a pink stealth fighter) in the menu bar, and the Found search box will slide out from the left side of your screen. Start typing the name of a file or app (“cat tie”), and the results will appear in real-time, date ordered. You can narrow down the results by including a file extension (“jpg cat tie”). Arrow down and each search result will show as a preview in the middle of your screen. You can tab to jump between sources. When you do locate that photo of your kitty, hit Enter and it should open.

The Found application is in beta, so there are still some kinks to be worked out. Gmail attachments don’t seem to open if you’re logged into a different account in your browser, and it’s not yet as fast as Spotlight for searching your hard drive.

But even in beta, there are some nice touches that reflect smart, careful design and make me optimistic for the final product. For example, you can drag and drop a found file to anywhere else on your computer, including onto an open Gmail message where it will be added as an attachment. What will really make the product a must have is the addition of other services. Brady says he hopes to add support for Evernote, Box, and Salesforce in the near future. If they manage to link it to multiple devices, it would be a killer utility for every person with scattered files.

If you don’t want to wait until May to use the app, you can sign up for an invite for the beta version of Found on the company website.

The company was founded in 2010 by Stephen Brady and Vijay Sundaram, who met while working together at Microsoft. The co-founders are not yet divulging their plans for making money off the application, which will be free and have no ads. The San Francisco-based startup has five employees and has received 1M in seed funding from NEA and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

With each new release of Apple’s operating system, several older Mac models get left out in the cold when it comes to support. The just-announced Mountain Lion OS is no exception, and thanks to TUAW we now we have a list of several machines that won’t run it when it comes out late Summer 2012.

Much like the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard, the upgrade to the new Mountain Lion OS will act as a minor update to last year’s Lion OS. The Mountain Lion update will mostly look just like Lion, except it will add in iOS-like features. It will offer deeper integration with iCloud (even though iCloud is still mostly a failure), and it will offer a Notification Center and Game Center for staying better connected. It will also add in iMessage, Reminders, and Notes from iOS.

TUAW dug into the system requirements to find out which Mac models will be to run Mountain Lion. According to TUAW’s list, the following models will support the new OS:

• iMac (mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook aluminum edition: (13 inch 2008 or newer)
• MacBook plastic edition: (early 2009 or newer)
• Macbook Pro (2009, or late 2007 if you had a 17-inch version or newer)
• MacBook Air (2008 or newer)
• Mac Mini (early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (early 2009 or newer)

And of course, this means that the following older models will not run Mountain Lion:

• Late 2006 iMacs (iMac5,1, iMac5,2, iMac6,1)
• All plastic MacBooks that pre-date the aluminum unibody redesign (MacBook2,1, MacBook3,1, MacBook4,1)
• MacBook Pros released prior to June 2007 (MacBookPro2,1, MacBookPro2,2)
• The original MacBook Air (MacBookAir1,1)
• The Mid-2007 Mac mini (Macmini2,1)
• The original Mac Pro and its 8-core 2007 refresh (MacPro1,1, MacPro2,1)
• Late 2006 and Early 2008 Xserves (Xserve1,1, Xserve2,1)

Did your machine make the cut or will you stuck with Lion?

Mountain lion photo: Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority

The apple of Apple’s eye, Twitter, will soon be the default social graph and social network for all iOS and Mac devices, as Facebook once again gets the shaft.

Apple has integrated Twitter into OS X Mountain Lion, the next-generation operating system for Macs announced Thursday and slated for summer release. The decision has profound implications for Twitter and will, should recent history repeat itself, help it dramatically increase signups and tweet volume across the world.

Twitter will be baked into the new Mac operating system in much the same way that is weaved into the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad experience today.

After signing into Twitter once, members can tweet links, photos, and content from the share button built into Apple’s Safari, Notes, Reminders, Photo Booth, and iPhone apps, and from third-party apps that update to support the integration. Twitterers will also receive notifications for Twitter mentions and direct messages on the desktop, and notifications will appear in the new Mountain Lion Notification Center.

If this all sounds trivial, consider that Twitter is attributing an enormous amount of its recent new user and tweet volume growth to iOS integration.

“iOS 5 makes Tweeting easier than ever,” a Twitter spokesperson told VenterBeat Thursday. “Since the launch we’ve seen signups more than double and the number of Tweets sent increase over 90 percent.”

Apple released iOS 5 with Twitter integration in October 2011. Four months in, Twitter is clearly reaping the benefits of being the favored social network. As I said at the time, “It’s as if Apple reached down in a God-like fashion, grabbed Twitter with its almighty hand, and lifted it up to the social networking heavens.”

Flickr and Vimeo may also soon experience the advantages of having a friend in a high places. The photo and video sites are also integrated into the Mac OS X Mountain Lion sharing experience.

Noticeably absent, however, is Facebook. Apple and Facebook, we hear, are actively attempting to mend their complicated relationship, but neither is talking openly about Mountain Lion integration.

“iOS is an important platform for Facebook and we have a good relationship with Apple, working closely with their developer relations team on our Facebook and Messenger apps,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat. “As you know, we don’t comment on what we might or might not do in the future.”

This post was updated at 5:03 p.m. Pacific with a comment from Facebook.

Photo credits: Mara earthlight/Flickr and Apple

In addition to the announcements about Apple’s next operating system Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the company rolled out a beta edition of its iMessages chat app today.

Apple previously launched its iMessages for the iPhone and iPad as an answer to RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger Service. The app lets you send text, pictures, contacts, and video over 3G and Wi-Fi connections to anyone with an Apple ID or one of the other third-party messaging services. One big perk to using Messages is that it doesn’t charge you for each individual message, similar to the way wireless carriers do with SMS. Now, Apple wants to bring this functionality to the desktop in an effort to bridge the gap between conversations on mobile devices.

The new Messages beta replaces Apple’s native OS X instant message client iChat, which aggregates the IM functionality from several third-party services (Google Chat, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber accounts) into a sole location. Personally, I prefer using other IM applications (such as the open-source Adium) so I never paid much attention to iChat anyway, which I’m guessing the majority of other Mac users did as well. That said, I might actually use the new Messages app in addition to my preferred IM desktop client.

Unlike iChat, the Messages app doesn’t just focus on communicating with people who appear online at the same time that you do. Both the new desktop app as well as the iMessages iPhone/iPad counterpart emphasize short back-and-forth responses similar to SMS conversations. The app still has a buddy list of contacts, but the chat window looks nearly identical to the iMessages iOS apps.

People who never use instant messenger but frequently send texts will probably end up using this app. It’s also likely that far fewer SMS messages will get sent over the course of time, especially if you consider the rising cost of texting plans. That’s a good thing for Apple and a very bad thing for wireless carriers, who draw a large amount of revenue through texting services.

The Messages beta app is available now via Apple’s official site, with the full release due out with the launch of OS X Mountain Lion.

Image courtesy of senai aksoy, Shutterstock

Apple unveiled its next big cat operating system for desktops today, OS X “Mountain Lion,” which shares even more with iOS than its predecessor.

Like OS X Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion (technically OS X version 10.8) is being positioned as a minor upgrade over last year’s Lion release. For the most part, the new OS looks the same, but it also includes apps that first appeared on iOS, deeper integration with iCloud, as well as the Notification Center and Game Center from iOS.

Developers can get their hands on Mountain Lion today in a preview release, but the rest of us will have to wait until this summer for the software. Apple typically holds events to reveal new versions of Mac OS X, so the fact that the company quietly unveiled the OS today is yet another sign that this isn’t a huge release. Apple is also quietly killing off the “Mac” part of the OS X name.

The new OS will bring over iMessage, Reminders, and Notes from iOS, which will all synchronize with their mobile counterparts. Apple is also releasing a beta version of iMessage today, which replaces iChat for instant messaging functionality, for current OS X Lion users. iMessage will let OS X users send free messages to iOS 5 users, and the conversations will also be seamlessly synchronized between mobile and desktop.

Powering synchronization behind the scenes in Mountain Lion is deeper integration with iCloud, which is now also featured on the OS X Finder.

Notification Center will wrangle together all of your application notifications in one spot, much like the popular program Growl. It’ll be accessible from anywhere in the OS with a new two-finger swipe motion. Game Center, not surprisingly, will serve as the go-to spot for all of your games, and will also bring over leaderboards and achievements from iOS.

More than anything, the new Mountain Lion seems dedicated to unifying your experience between iOS and OS X with iCloud. But at the moment, it seems like most of its new additions could have simply been software upgrades to Lion. Expect Apple to reveal more new features for Mountain Lion in the coming months, which will likely justify its standing as a whole new OS.

It’s interesting to consider how Apple is approaching its new OS compared to Microsoft, which is fundamentally changing what a desktop OS can be with Windows 8. Both companies are attempting to bring mobile elements to the desktop, but Apple is taking a more incremental approach (which, admittedly, it always has with OS X), whereas Microsoft is diving headfirst into new territory.

Mountain Lion also adds Share Sheets, which will basically let you share files with services like Twitter, as well as AirPlay Mirroring, which can push whatever is on your screen to an Apple TV. There will also be improvements to how OS X handles apps from the Mac App Store, thanks to new security levels and the addition of developer signatures, which allow the OS to alert you when you’re installing software from unsigned developers.

Apple also isn’t saying anything about bringing its virtual assistant Siri over to Mountain Lion, which for many would be reason enough to upgrade.

Via CNet

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

iPhones and iPads now account for more web traffic than Macs, according to a study by ad network Chitika.

Chitika measured the percentage of its ad impressions that were delivered to iOS devices and the percentage going to OS X devices. According to the firm, iOS has been steadily gaining ground since August, 2011, while OS X has lost 25 percent of its market share since September.

As of February, 2011, the iOS market share surpassed OS X for the first time, with both notching approximately 8 percent of overall web page views.

It’s worth noting that this study applies only to web pages within Chitika’s network, but the company says the data set includes hundreds of millions of ad impressions. Because the web-based data applies to devices that people are actually using, not what they’re buying, it’s an interesting correlation to sales-based data. In the first quarter of 2012, for instance, Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and just 5.2 million Macs.

It’s not quite the death of the desktop, but mobile devices are gaining ground on their traditional brethren, at least within the Apple-centric world.

Still, Apple CEO Tim Cook is unlikely to be worried about one of his products losing market share to another, as Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng noted.

“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe that there’s much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad,” Cook said on Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, “and there’s much more left to cannibalize.”

Hat tip: BGR

Chart courtesy Chitika.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Florida-based Operating System Solutions has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, the website Patently Apple reports. But the surprising part is that the patent in question was originally owned by LG Electronics.

Count 1 in the court’s document reads, “Apple sells or offers to sell within this district, computer systems, including but not limited to the MacBook Pro, that utilize the Mac OSX operating system that infringes at least claim 1 of the OSS [Operating System Solutions] Patent.”

The patent abstract describes it as “a method for quickly booting a personal computer system using boot configuration information on memory and the attached devices that was created and saved in a hard disk at the preceding boot process.” Its quick boot method is a multi-step process (see flow chart below) that involves saving a computer’s boot configuration to memory so that it can boot up more quickly in the future. According to the lawsuit, Apple’s OS X violates this method in the patent.

Patently Apple points out that the original owner of the 2002 patent was LG Electronics, but it was subsequently reissued to Protimus Technologies in 2008. It’s unclear how the patent found its way to OSS — a company which can’t even be located via a Google search — or if LG still has any ties to the patent. Since OSS has no Internet presence, it’s likely that it’s a patent holding company (also known as a patent troll).

Apple’s market share has been slowly rising and the popularity of the iPhone has put Apple’s products into the spotlight. Hackers are taking notice and they’re figuring out that Apple’s computers have security vulnerabilities, some of them more severe than Windows machines, according to a talk by the iSEC Partners security consulting team at the Black Hat security conference today.

Alex Stamos (pictured), Paul Youn, and B.J. Orvis of iSEC Partners said in their talk that it is possible for hackers to penetrate a network of Apple Mac computers and lurk undetected while gathering data. They concluded that there were so many vulnerabilities on the networking level that Mac machines could be considered more vulnerable than Windows machines.

Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment. At Black Hat, there will also be talks about the vulnerabilities of other operating systems, including Windows. In years past, security researchers have blamed Microsoft for producing vulnerable Windows code. And immediately following the Apple talk, security researchers had another talk about hacking Google’s Chrome operating system.

“This is all changing,” Stamos said. “If [recent hacking events] tell us anything, it’s that any computer is vulnerable to attack.”

The iSEC team said they looked at attacks on the Mac and its latest operating system, code-named Lion, or OS X version 10.7, from the perspective of Advanced Persistent Threats, or long-term security break-ins on networks of computers. They showed examples of the vulnerabilities and detailed proof that they had hacked into the operating system.

The category of Advanced Persistent Threats is a hot one because Google discovered that, under Operation Aurora, dozens of companies were compromised over a long period of time. And McAfee reported today that a similar attacked, dubbed Operation Shady RAT, compromised a total of 72 governments and corporations over a five-year period.

A network of Mac computers can be compromised in the usual way, iSEC’s Stamos said. A single user can be tricked out of giving up a username and password through social engineering or targeted “phishing attacks,” or attacks that use a believable ruse to get you to enter your username and password, which is then captured and compromised by the hackers.

Once inside the network, Stamos said that it is easy for the attacker to escalate the privileges he or she has on the network. That is where Apple’s operating system falls down in comparison to Windows. ”Once you have access, you can compromise the networking,” Orvis said. “Network privilege escalation is where it really gets bad on the Mac.”

The security researchers said that Apple has made improvements to security in version 10.7 of OS X, such as putting applications in a “sandbox,” or isolating them so that they can run (or crash) without taking down the rest of the operating system. Still, the researchers said they had figured out a couple of different ways to compromise the security of Macs through a test program dubbed Bonjoof. They said that it’s possible to lurk on a network and cover your tracks so that intelligence can be gathered on a network over time.

“All of Apple’s major authentication protocols suffer” from some kind of weakness, Orvis said.

There are ways to deal with the vulnerabilities, but company security professionals have to know how to use security forensics technology, which can take a long time. In the meantime, attackers can detect the forensics tools and react to their usage in an attempt to hide. The security researchers said they did talk with Apple about the vulnerabilities they found and communicated a number of ideas about how to improve the security of Apple’s computers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple announced Thursday that its latest operating system — OS X 10.7, codenamed Lion — has sold more than 1 million copies since it made its debut on the Mac App Store just one day earlier.

The new operating system costs $29.99 on the App Store. That means that Apple has raked in a little less than $30 million. That amounts to around 0.1 percent of the company’s quarterly revenue, according to the company’s most recent earnings report. The OS has proved pretty popular so far on the store, with around 90 percent of people who download Lion leaving positive reviews.

Apple distributed Lion through the Mac App Store as a 4-gigabyte download rather than on a physical DVD or hard copy like most operating systems. That made it possible for more people to download the operating system quickly. It also sets a standard for future software releases, Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg told VentureBeat.

“Typically the idea of downloading the 4 gigabyte operating system and installing it over existing stuff and expecting it to work isn’t a common expectation for a lot of users,” he said. “Conventional wisdom says you should do a clean install, and broadband connections are finally fast enough.”

Lion is built to be a more lightweight operating system that takes a lot of inspiration from the company’s mobile iPhone operating system, iOS. (See our hands-on look at OS X Lion.) It features a springboard-style Launchpad for opening apps and introduces a lot of multi-touch gestures that are already prevalent on the iPhone and iPad.

“At the end of the day, it’s not the $30, it’s about how this will continue to drive Mac sales and how it continues to drive iPad and iPhone sales,” Gartenberg said. “The whole experience is evocative of using an iPad, and that’s going to drive more iPad and iPhone sales.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s latest Mac operating system — OS X 10.7, codenamed Lion — has finally come out. It’s designed to invoke the same kind of lightweight hands-on feel the iPhone operating system, iOS, has made popular. With just about every computer carrying a multi-touch trackpad, that should be pretty straightforward.

Right?

Well, not quite. After spending some time with OS X Lion, I get the impression that Apple made a lot of unnecessary changes to add a layer of gloss to the operating system. It’s trying hard to be like the iPhone, but at the end of the day it feels like a Mac with iOS features hastily duct-taped to the surface. And the tape peels away rather quickly when you try to stress-test each application.

The new operating system boasts more than 250 new changes, with a lot of that happening under the hood thanks to the operating system’s transition from Carbon to Cocoa. Most of the new features, like the Launchpad and Mission Control, in the operating system are inspired by the iPhone operating system. Lion is in some ways the end of an era for the Mac OS X operating system, as the company transitions to a more lightweight operating system like iOS.

I’m just not sure if that’s a good thing yet.

Scrolling

Let’s start with the first thing you’ve probably heard about Lion: Scrolling is backwards. That is, when you use two fingers on the trackpad to make the current window scroll up and down, the window moves in the opposite direction as it did in previous versions.

In Snow Leopard, windows scroll up when your fingers move down, as if the trackpad were a wheel rolling against the window. In Lion, windows scroll down when your fingers move down, as if the trackpad were a virtual part of the window. It’s more iOS-like, and arguably more logical. But it will take some getting used to.

I tried using it for an evening, and I wasn’t a fan. Fortunately, you can turn it off in System Preferences.

Spaces and Mission Control

The largest change is the addition of “Mission Control,” which replaces the old Exposé feature in Snow Leopard. OS X originally featured a way to quickly page through four separate versions of a desktop laid out on a virtual grid. Mission Control lets you add an unlimited number of new desktops — called Spaces — that you can access through a similar fashion. One quick hand gesture lets you quickly view every Space you currently have open.

The unlimited number of desktops is important because a lot of the apps are now designed to run in full screen mode. I know personally I used to reserve one or two spaces for specific apps, such as Mail, so the new way of doing it felt more or less natural. Instead of having a space reserved for a windowed app, it’s a full screen app. It’s an elegant solution for cutting down clutter on your screen.

Only a few native applications currently support the full screen feature, and it doesn’t work for every app. Chrome, for example, supports a full screen mode, but because it isn’t yet native for Lion, it doesn’t work quite the same as other full screen apps. The operating system still reserves one “main” space that takes up a majority of the screen when you want to browse through all your spaces at once, which is useful for apps that are designed to be used simultaneously — such as a chat app and a web browser.

Switching spaces isn’t as pleasant an experience as it was in Snow Leopard. The transitions in the old operating system were smooth, compared to the jerky jumps in Lion. Icons on your desktop also re-render for each new space, which feels pretty weird. Snow Leopard had the advantage of letting you jump to a specific space with a single keystroke, thanks to the grid-style layout. With Lion, you have to page left and right between spaces, so a lot of time is spent jumping over unused or less frequently used spaces.

The main Mission Control screen helps circumvent that, but it still feels slower than the old way of accessing a space in Snow Leopard, which was basically a single keystroke.

Launchpad and Apps

Finding apps can be a touch difficult for newbies in prior versions OS X. Apps either show up in the dock on the side of the screen, or you have to dig through the Mac’s file browser, the Finder, to get to the Apps folder and launch a program.

Enter Launchpad, Lion’s simplified spot to launch applications. Like many other aspects of Lion, it feels like the iPhone operating system.

Lion automatically lays out your applications in a grid that you can access with a gesture or by dragging your mouse to a corner of the screen. The first page of the Launchpad is reserved for Apple native apps, and then the rest of the pages are populated by apps you personally install.

It was frustrating at first when I tried to access Chrome, only to find that my most-used app on the computer was excluded from the first page. Luckily, you can re-order the launchpad to suit your needs, but I wish the operating system could automatically handle organization to make my most-used apps more accessible.

It’s a problem because the Launchpad is populated with every app on my system. That means that while I have an icon for Gimp, an open-source photo-editing client, I also have an icon for all the extra video codecs, Silverlight, uninstaller programs and a whole lot of other things I will never use. They clutter the Launchpad and are a pain to remove (which took a little bit of time to figure out.)

It feels like the Launchpad is, and will be, useful, but the whole process of re-configuring it took out a little chunk of time and left a bad taste in my mouth as part of the whole experience. Luckily, you can ignore the whole experience my turning off the gesture and the corner access, and going back to the old Dock- and Finder-based way of launching apps.

App Makeovers

Three of Apple’s basic applications received serious redesigns in Lion. The Mail App now features a three-column display similar to the iPad, while Contacts and iCal — the Mac’s native calendar app — received face-lifts.

The mail redesign is sensible, but it has slowed the app down a little bit. In the old Mail App, I could quickly page through more than a hundred emails in the span of a few minutes and have each of them register as read. With the new app, I have to sit on a single message for around a second and a half before it is registered as read. I’m pretty nitpicky about this because I prefer to have an empty inbox whenever possible, so even that minor delay is annoying.

But the address book and the calendar apps are writing checks the OS X design can’t cash. In Leopard, both apps were very easy to quickly access and edit and they weren’t flashy. In Lion, the new apps received a visual face lift and now feel more garish than anything else when compared to the typical minimalist feel of OS X.

The calendar app still retains a slightly similar feel to its predecessor, and it works well as a full screen application. But the change to the design of the app feels unnecessary and is more disorienting than anything else. It’s pretty clear that Apple is trying to evoke an iPhone-like feel for the calendar, but it falls short of even that — the iOS calendar app is also minimalist, like the Mac calendar app’s predecessor.

Documents and Versions

TextEdit, the document editing tool built into OS X, has also received a makeover. That change is pretty welcome, because it even finds a way to be more minimalist and accessible than the last version. The new app adds more formatting features to the top bar, but the biggest change in the app is versioning.

Whenever you make a change to a document, you save it as a “version” rather than overwriting the old file completely. Lion saves the changes to the document, rather than the full document, so in theory it shouldn’t take up an enormous amount of disk space no matter how many revisions you make. When you want to browse old versions, the document app jumps to a full-screen view that shows two versions side-by-side.

That’s a great idea — in theory. But the full-screen view is also populated with an obnoxious animated background of moving stars in space that is distracting. It would make more sense to just open up a second version of a document and display it without having to feel flashy.

Aesthetics

You’ll quickly notice a few subtle things have changed about the way Apple displays windows. The most obvious aesthetic change is the scroll bar for a window. What was once a sugar-coated shiny piece of candy of a scroll bar is now a subtle gray bar that disappears when it isn’t in use in native apps. It evokes the same feel the iPhone operating system has. That makes sense of a 3.5-inch screen, because real estate is a premium. For Lion, it works, but doesn’t add a whole lot to the experience.

The rounded, bold blues of the Aqua user interface are now more subdued and considerably less shiny. Most rounded-style buttons and radio buttons have been replaced with a duller, more minimalist hue. It actually feels more welcome than any of the other design changes, because it gets another part of the operating system out of the way of the user and lets them focus on the experience of an app or a web browser.

The Finder has also picked up a redesign, with the bright and colorful icons replaced with a monochrome gray set that homogenizes the sidebar. You can switch icons in the Finder to a cover-flow style display that lets you flick through them quickly with a finger gesture.

Speed — or lack thereof

It feels like Lion is missing a level of polish that is typically present with the company’s other operating systems. Snow Leopard felt crisp and the installation was smooth as silk (it even showed off a little by shrinking the size of the operating system on your hard disk.) More than anything else, my Mac felt faster after the Snow Leopard installation.

Lion, by contrast, has added a layer of sluggishness to my day. Whether it’s nitpicky little concerns like having to page through multiple spaces or the frequent times the operating system has borked and left my computer hanging for upwards of 30 seconds, it’s frustrating. It’s even more frustrating when I’m on a deadline and I feel like I have to fight with the operating system to get it to work.

I have never had more issues installing and initially running an operating system than I have had with Lion. The Launchpad, Mission Control and a whole host of other goodies introduced in Lion have occasionally left my Mac hanging with little recourse other than to restart the thing. It feels like Apple has made a lot of changes that were unnecessary, and those changes have slowed down the operating system considerably.

The app is available for $29 on the Mac App Store. It’s hard to argue against an upgrade simply because Apple will inevitably address user concerns in future updates. But at the end of the day, I can’t help but feel like I want to switch back to Snow Leopard.

Chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer mentioned the ship date in the company’s earnings call Tuesday. Apple earlier had said only that the OS would ship in “July.” Speculation mounted that it would appear this week after rumors surfaced of boxes being delivered to Apple stores around the world, but the company had not given a firm ship date.

The OS includes over 250 new features. The highlights of OS X Lion’s features include multitouch gesture support, the ability to run apps in a tablet-like fullscreen mode, and “Mission Control,” a multitouch-enhanced upgrade to previous OS X’s Expose and Spaces features that makes it easier to switch between apps.

OS X will also be available as a download from the Mac OS X App Store, Apple has promised. The OS will cost $29.99.