Apple

Isn’t it great when exclusive product details leak before the manufacturer is ready? Well I doubt Apple will being sharing my point of view this week as exclusive details of the new iPod Touch and Nano have made it in to the mainstream.

Plans for the next–gen iPod touch and iPod nano have been rumoured for a few weeks now. But the latest batch of shots of new cases from China throw up some interesting tidbits about Apple’s latest efforts, due for an official airing in September.

If you’re tired of waiting for Apple to pull its finger out and launch whatever it thinks a Mac netbook should look like, you can take matters into your own hands.

Hackers (the good kind) have been hard at work figuring out how to get Mac OS up and running on all manner of netbooks, and Boing Boing Gadgets has been keeping regular tabs on their efforts.

What's Apple trying to hide? Apparently, when it comes to the notion that Apple's iPods are potentially lethal weapons capable of overheating and bursting into flame at a moment's notice, a lot. There's some 800 pages of documents from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) detailing how iPods have been seen to smoke, catch fire and sometimes burn their owners.

While a variety of sources have published a story accusing the iPhone 3.0 software of broadcasting instant messages to random iPhones, in reality this exploit affects only users who have hacked their phone and made it vulnerable.

Apple has admitted what's been rumored for weeks: It can't make enough iPhone 3GS smartphones to keep up with demand.

Early in his prepared remarks that opened Tuesday's conference call with reporters and analysts detailing Apple's quarterly financial results, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said: "We are current unable to make enough iPhone 3GSs to meet robust demand, and we're working to address this."

Over the past decade, the world has seen advances in rootkits running on Windows and Unix operating systems that few would have thought possible. Now, it's Mac OS X's turn, as a security researcher plans to share a variety of techniques for developing the ultra-stealthy programs for the Apple platform.

At a talk titled Advanced Mac OS X rootkits at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next week, researcher Dino Dai Zovi plans to discuss specific features in the OS that make it possible to write rootkits that are virtually impossible for untrained users to detect.

A few tweaks of the MacBook and Apple could render the Netbook a non-issue.

At the risk of adding to the cacophony of gratuitous advice directed at Apple, the company could bypass the Netbook and go directly to the inexpensive "ultra-thins" category--where Apple seems to be headed anyway with the incredibly shrinking price of the MacBook Air. In short, take the thin, aluminum unibody enclosure that is a MacBook and move it downmarket.

It should come as no surprise that Apple isn't a big fan of Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" ads, but some may be surprised to learn the Mac maker's lawyers reportedly called a senior Microsoft executive and demanded the ads be removed.

Regardless of what you may think of Apple computers, their designs do hold a certain attractive quality. We were mightily impressed last October with the new unibody construction but we've always been very against the all-glass display.

While the glossy glass display looks stunning in the show room, especially when the machine is off, the added frustration of dealing with extreme glare makes it something that most road warriors will end up hating.

MacRumors reports that the latest iPhone 3.1 beta 2 OS release breaks hacks that allow AT&T customers to tether their phones to their PCs for wireless access. As all iPhone enthusiasts know, “legal” tethering is available in most other countries already, but AT&T hasn’t yet rolled out the feature to US iPhone customers.