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I'll avoid the dicey proposition of naming what I think is the best product of the year. But I can say with certainty that Apple's iPad was the most disruptive. My iPad is usually beside me in the car. (Credit: Brooke Crothers) Beyond the iPad's well-chronicled popularity, impressive shipment numbers, and reported theft of Netbook market share, the disruption for me was very personal: it played havoc with my own computing habits and with people around me who bought the iPad. As I've written before, initially, I could do little more than paw at the screen in a vain effort...

An iCal alarm popped up for us today. It said: Mark Oct. 22 on your calendar. That's the day that Apple's classic 'I'm a Mac. I'm A PC' attack ads are going to cease to be humorous. Oct. 22 is, of course, the formal release date of Windows 7... Here's what I believe will happen: The Windows 7 launch will take those market-share gains Apple has seen over the past several years and make them disappear... Yes, the Mac has had a great run for the past couple of years. Gartner says Apple's share of the U.S. computer market for...

According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek on Wednesday, Apple will hold a special event by Valentine’s Day to introduce a new iPhone compatible with the Verizon Wireless network. The report mirrors one of two theories posed by BGR Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Geller earlier this month. Businessweek goes on to suggest that while the launch of an iPhone for Verizon Wireless could have a sizable impact on AT&T’s business, it will not be the “death blow” many have speculated. Even if AT&T loses as many as 6 million subscribers as a result of Verizon’s iPhone launch, Businessweek postulates, the lost revenue...

(CNN) -- Less than a year ago, some technology pundits questioned whether Apple's "iTablet" would find any buyers. InfoWorld ventured to explain "Why Apple's rumored iTablet will fail big time," while VentureBeat's 2010 predictions included the claim that "tablets will fail." Fast-forward to the end of 2010, and the iPad is a smash hit. eMarketer predicts that Apple will sell 13.3 million iPads this year, and one survey ranked the iPad as the most-wanted gift this holiday season. But the iPad has reshaped more than just the device market: From publishing to web design, we're seeing the iPad change the...

The year’s most significant new technology was a disruptive product made by Apple. This year, the editors of TIME Magazine chose for its Person of the Year award a young, enterprising 27-year old male who built a social networking website that has 500 million users and now has a net worth of $30 billion. Man, that’s so 2006. I mean, was 2010 so crappy that the only real choice was between an obnoxious, ethically-challenged egotistic Web 2.0 billionaire Wunderkind or an Information Technology terrorist pretending to be a journalist and Internet activist? Couldn’t they come up with someone who...

Despite what you may have heard, Apple products are not immune to viruses and other computer attacks. In 2007 an annual computer security conference called CanSecWest sought to prove this point by hosting a hacking contest called Pwn2Own. They offered $10,000 plus the MacBook being used to anyone who could successfully break into the brand new, fully patched MacBook running Tiger. (The name Pwn2Own comes from the hacker word "Pwn" which means to take over a computer, so you Pwn the computer to own the computer). Any vulnerabilities used in the contest would have to be given to the organizers...

CPTN Holdings LLC (acquirer of 882 Novell patents): Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle are the partners according to German antitrust notification Breaking news: Twitter user @VM_gville (whose account has meanwhile disappeared) pointed me to the website of the German federal antitrust authority ("Bundeskartellamt"), which discloses a merger (or more precisely, joint venture) notification filed a week ago (on 09 December 2010), according to which the four companies behind CPTN Holdings LLC -- the acquirer of 882 Novell patents -- are Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle. The product market in which the newly formed company plans to operate is defined as...

Nokia announced it has filed claims in the UK High Court, Dusseldorf and Mannheim District Courts in Germany and the District Court of the Hague, Netherlands, alleging that Apple infringes Nokia patents in many of its products sold in these countries, including iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. "These actions add 13 further Nokia patents to the 24 already asserted against Apple in the US International Trade Commission and the Delaware and Wisconsin Federal courts," said Paul Melin, vice president, Intellectual Property at Nokia. "The Nokia inventions protected by these patents include several which enable compelling user experiences. For example, using...

Apple is set to cash in, with nearly eight in 10 businesses opting for iPads, survey saysThe number of corporations arming workers with tablets will double early next year, a research firm said today, citing its recent survey of more than 1,600 IT buyers. The November poll by ChangeWave Research showed that Apple's iPad will remain the dominant workplace player even as historically strong enterprise players like Hewlett-Packard enter the market. Calling the demand for tablets "explosive," ChangeWave reported that 14 percent of the businesses polled said their firms are planning to buy tablets for employees in the first quarter...

A new report from NSS Labs studies how various Web browsers perform when it comes to blocking socially-engineered attacks. The startling results show that Internet Explorer isn't just better than rival browsers like Chrome and Firefox--but leaves competitors completely in the dust. ... NSS Labs reviewed Internet Explorer 8 and 9, Firefox 3.6, Safari 5, Chrome 6, and Opera 10 to see how well each browser helps users recognize and avoid these attacks. Data was collected 24/7 for eleven days, with 39 discrete tests run every six hours. The testing included 636 URLs identified as potentially malicious. ... Meanwhile, Internet...

Report says Redmond will finally get around to shipping devices that can compete with Apple's slate and Android-based devices. Microsoft plans to introduce a range of new tablets powered by its Windows 7 operating system at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to a published report. The software maker, which is under pressure to produce a slate that can go head-to-head with Apple's iPad and devices powered by Google's Android OS, will unveil slates manufactured by OEM partners Dell and Samsung, according The New York Times. The Times, citing unnamed sources, said the Samsung devices would be "similar...

Ponca City writes "PC World reports that women are more likely to buy an iPhone for their next smartphone purchase, while men prefer Android devices. According to data collected in October 2010, 31 percent of women wanted to buy an Apple iOS device next, followed by 22.8 percent interested in a Google Android device while among men preferences were reversed with 32.6 percent of men interested in an Android purchase and 28.6 desired an iOS phone. 'So where is the extra appeal of Android to men coming from?' asks Tracey E. Schelmetic. 'More male-targeted commercials that emphasize cool gadgetry versus...

The quantity of malware targeted at the Mac platform has been highlighted since the roll out of a free Mac anti-virus solution. Since it launched its free Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition software, Sophos has reported that there has been 150,000 downloads and from this it has determined the most commonly encountered malware that these Mac users are encountering. The most popular is Mal/ASDFDldr-A, what Sophos detects as malicious files that use the scripting capability of Microsoft Media Player to force your web browser to visit an infected site. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: “Normally the infected media...

ChangeWave survey looks at reactions and impressions of new smart phone owners An onslaught of new smart phones have hit the market recently as manufacturers battle one another to meet the sharply escalating demand for new features and leading-edge technologies. To find out which manufacturers are currently winning and losing this battle, we asked 1,212 consumers who had purchased smart phones within the past six months to rate their new models. The ChangeWave survey was completed November 2, 2010. Customer Satisfaction Ratings First off, we looked at customer satisfaction with the new smart phones that respondents had purchased during the...

Electronista reports, "The iPhone 4's disputed antenna has given Android a virtual sweep of the top phone rankings at Consumer Reports, the magazine's latest ratings showed today." "A decision to avoid recommending the iPhone 4 has made Android-based Samsung Captivate the highest recommended smartphone on AT&T, leaving the iPhone 3GS in second place," Electronista reports. Electronista reports, "When searched separately, the iPhone 4 held on to a 76 point score that would have given it the same ranking as the Captivate... . The magazine nonetheless reiterated that, without an actual design change, it couldn't put the iPhone 4 in the...

Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.5 which is available via Software Update and contains the following improvements: • Improves reliability with Microsoft Exchange servers. • Addresses performance of some image-processing operations in iPhoto and Aperture. • Addresses stability and performance of graphics applications and games. • Resolves a delay between print jobs. • Addresses a printing issue for some HP printers connected to an AirPort Extreme. • Resolves an issue when dragging contacts from Address Book to iCal. • Addresses an issue in which dragging an item from a stack causes the Dock to not automatically hide. • Resolves...

Firefox extension created to shine a light on the problem of unencrypted websites fails, because rather than offering a solution, it only makes it worse. Most people know that public Wi-Fi hotspots aren't the safest connections in the world and probably aren't the best place to be doing things like online banking. But you probably didn't realize just how easy it is to steal logins for email and services like Facebook from other people on a hotspot. Well, thanks to a new Firefox extension called Firesheep, anyone can easily view other people on their network and, with a click of...

Back in June 2008, PrimeSense was looking to sell the technology that would eventually be engineered into what we now know as Xbox Kinect. The first company in Silicon Valley that PrimeSense CEO, Inon Beracha tried to demonstrate the sensor that powers Kinect to was none other than Apple. The technology had been developed by engineers in the Israeli military. When asked about why he thought of Apple first, Beracha told Cult of Mac that "It was the most natural place for the technology." The negotiations didn't go so well. Beracha figured the technology was so good that he would...

Microsoft has been at the top of the heap for almost as long as people have used PCs. They’ve managed to sustain an overwhelming competitive advantage, even after a decade’s worth of antitrust action and the astonishing transformation of Apple into a profit-making machine that has built one billion-dollar business after another while the entire rest of the tech industry is stuck in neutral. Indeed, the presence of Apple and Google as direct competitors suggests that maybe Microsoft is overdue to take a tumble. There is never a shortage of Apple-versus-Microsoft yammering in the blogosphere, but I haven’t seen much...

The sleek new MacBook Air models unveiled late last month are the slimmest computers Apple has ever produced — but the manufacturer still managed to find the space to pack in a few troublesome bugs. Early MacBook Air adopters have taken to various forums as they voice complaints surrounding Apple’s new MacBook Air (Late 2010) models. While Apple has yet to address any of the reported issues publicly, a source informed BGR that the manufacturer is investigating several of them internally. Included among the issues is a bug where the display flickers or shows horizontal lines of varying colors when...