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Apple has had its share of problems in the recent past over their marketing claims that the iPhone 3G is “twice as fast for half the price” of its predecessor, from ads being pulled in the UK to lawsuits being filed against the company for allegedly misleading customers as to what the device is truly capable of.

Sure, many of the complaints levied against the company are questionable (to say the least) but Apple’s latest response regarding this particular matter is quite interesting, with the company essentially saying that anyone who takes their ads literally is a fool.

Perhaps they are right to some extent, it’s no secret that companies tend to ‘stretch the truth’ in their advertisings, but when the statement is believable enough (twice as fast, half the price) and supported with a misleading simulated video showing the product in action, you might be pushing it. Apple has already moved to dismiss some of the iPhone 3G lawsuits filed against them, but this one in particular alleging the company falsely advertised the handset's performance is still alive and could be one interesting case to follow.

Safari is growing in popularity, according to recent figures, with estimates putting the browser as breaking a 7% share. That may seem like a small figure, but it truly wasn't that long ago when even Firefox was below that mark. As the biggest “alternative” browser, Firefox is continuing to grow as well. Safari's growth is coming primarily at the expense of Internet Explorer, which has now dipped below 70% for the first time in many years, falling far from the peak of 95% it held in 2002.

Safari goes hand in hand with Mac OS X, so watching growth of that browser is a good indicator of Mac growth as well. It's not entirely accurate, as you certainly aren't forced to use Safari on a Mac and Safari is available on Windows as well. The small discrepancy between the amount of Mac OS X users and Safari users can likely be attributed to people using other browsers on the Mac, but it still goes to show that the browser is doing well.

For many years anti-virus suites have primarily been found and endorsed on Windows platforms only. While they certainly existed on Linux, Mac OS X and even cell phones, it was rare to see them in action and even rarer to see a virus that threatened people enough to warrant such suites in the first place. The increased popularity of OS X is changing that, and for the first time since its release Apple has recommended that Mac users install anti-virus software.

Rattling off a list of anti-virus suites available on the Mac, Apple has encouraged “widespread” use of the programs, claiming it'll make virus writing a more difficult process. Realistically, though, what we see here is a change in the perception that Apple has about their own software in the world today. Typically, they work hard to avoid saying anything negative about Mac OS X, but admitting that users might need an anti-virus suite to stay safe is admitting that the OS is vulnerable after all – something numerous security researchers have been saying for a while.

This year has seen a number of viruses for Mac OS X find time in the public eye. While still not on the monumental level of viruses found on Windows, even Apple is now admitting that the OS alone is not enough to protect a user.

Apple has acknowledged two graphics issues with its new line of unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, and while a software update may remedy at least one of them, Apple is reportedly investigating whether the second one is software or hardware related (Nvidia must be crossing their fingers right now).

The lesser problem presents itself in the form of wave-like video distortions while scrolling in web browsers playing HD content, and since the distortions do not appear while running Windows, it is most likely just a Mac-specific driver issue. The second and more severe problem, however, causes the screen to go black after just a few minutes of gaming, while the system locks up and the audio enters into an infinite loop – leaving no option but to reboot the machine.

The issue exists under both Windows and Mac OS X, suggesting it could be a hardware problem, more specifically a thermal issue. Apparently some users have been able to mitigate the problem after installing alternative drivers for the notebook’s Nvidia graphics card and using a separate tool called SMCFancontrol to tweak the system’s fan speed.

The company is not offering customers exchanges until the issue is better understood, but those who have somehow managed to get their system swapped out for a new one claim the problems have disappeared completely, which fortunately suggests the flaw could be limited to an early batch of the notebooks. It’s a shame they let things like this slip, though, and it certainly isn’t the first time.

Apple has released a new QuickTime update, which will be of particular interest to owners of MacBook and MacBook Pro unibody computers because it fixes a widely publicized issue where some users were unable to play legally purchased movie files from iTunes on external displays.

You see, Apple’s new mini DisplayPort enforces HDCP protection. But while the scheme is intended to prevent digital copying of high definition content, several users were complaining last week about being unable to playback standard definition iTunes movies over a mini DisplayPort to VGA connector. According to notes provided with the update, QuickTime 7.5.7 addresses this issue, meaning that current SD movie content purchased or rented on a Mac should playback unrestricted.

You can download this update via Software Update (Apple menu > Software Update) or by visiting the Apple support website.

It’s pretty rare to find Apple products selling for anything other than full retail price, but the company plans to host a special “Black Friday” sale in its online and retail stores to kick off the holiday buying season. Though short on details, a teaser running on the vendor’s website promises “dozens of great iPod, iPhone and Mac gift ideas.”

In addition, Apple has internally announced that retail store employees can match prices of other authorized retailers, which is particularly interesting since Best Buy is already offering discounts of up to $150 off on current Macs. Apparently, price-matching has always been Apple's policy but it sounds like the company wanted to make it crystal clear to its staff ahead of the holiday season.

Apple has released an update for the Apple TV digital media receiver, bringing the firmware up to version 2.3. The patch is available solely through the device’s built-in update feature and consists of four main improvements, key among which is the ability to stream music from the media device to either other Apple TV units or Airport Express speakers.

Apple has also added the ability to use third-party remote controls with Apple TV. You can still use the official remote, and of course, if you have an iPhone there is an excellent Apple-provided Remote application as well. Finally, the two remaining new features include the option for playlists that contain a mixture of various audio and video formats as well as the ability to adjust volume in the music section.

It is important to note that as with all other Apple TV firmware updates, running the update will remove any non-Apple TV software as well as unofficial hacks or tweaks made to the device.

In recent past Apple has been praised as a company that has at least verbally opposed DRM. More weight was given to their supposed DRM stance when they began offering some music from EMI without copy protection on iTunes. When it comes to hardware, however, Apple still seems to be in step with the industry. It's been discovered that Apple's new MacBook lines include full HDCP support, a technology intended to “ensure” that content being played back is only being played on “authorized” displays.

You can see an example of the technology in action here. The DRM-protected content refuses to play, due to an external projector attached to the machine being “unauthorized” to play it. In the future, Apple says, all of their hardware will support this feature. This could make keeping and playing back DRM-protected content even more cumbersome than it is now, with people finding themselves locked in not only to a particular machine, but to a particular display as well.

As the amount of HDCP-aware content increases you can expect more people to encounter this kind of issue as well. HDCP has been a controversial technology since its introduction years ago, though to date there has been very little fallout because of it. That could soon be changing.

The next major release of Apple’s operating system, dubbed “Snow Leopard,” is slated to come out next year. No specific date has been actually set for the launch, but when announced at the WWDC event back in June, the company said that Mac OS X 10.6 would be available in about a year. Now, however, a leaked slide from a recent presentation suggests it could be sooner.

Specifically the slide presented by the director of Apple’s Unix Technology Group, Jordan Hubbard, shows Snow Leopard will ship in the first quarter of 2009 – sparking speculation that the company could show off a near finalized copy at January's Macworld Expo and follow up with an official release a couple of months later.

Rather than emphasize revolutionary new features, Snow Leopard is said to focus on performance and stability, with Apple particularly mentioning it will be optimized for multi-core processors and that should also enable “breakthrough amounts of RAM.”

The legal counterclaims filed against Apple by Mac clone maker Psystar have been dismissed today, following a decision by US District Judge William Alsup that the brand loyalty that Apple enjoys is not the same as lack of competition in the market.

Apparently, the definition of a “market” was central to Psystar’s argument, but the judge felt that Psystar failed to provide sufficient legal support for its assertion that the Mac OS makes up an entire market of its own and that Apple was engaging in antitrust practices by limiting it to its computers.

If you haven't been following the story, Psystar has been selling computers running OS X since April, it got sued by Apple in July, and then retaliated a month later with an antitrust claim of its own. The latest ruling it’s going to be difficult for Psystar to overcome, though. The company now has around 20 days to amend its complaint, or else get ready to defend itself against Apple’s claims that it is infringing on its copyright material and trademarks.

Apple didn’t just announce the new unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro families at its notebook-centric event last month, the company also added a 24-inch LED monitor to its Cinema Display offerings and has just started taking orders for it via the online Apple Store.

The 24-inch glossy, widescreen display features a 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution and uses LED-backlit technology to provide instant full-screen brightness and improved power efficiency. Many will despise the replacement of matte for glossy, surely, but others will welcome the new built-in iSight camera, microphone and stereo speakers.

Touted specifically for its redesigned MacBook offerings, the new LED Cinema Display also features an integrated MagSafe charger that allows users to plug in and power their Apple notebooks, plus a three-port USB 2.0 hub and an aluminum and glass enclosure. The new monitor from Apple will set you back $899 and shipments should begin sometime later this month.

As much as Apple would like the world to believe that the iPhone is a perfect device, the truth is that just like any other sophisticated piece of technology it can have numerous issues go wrong with it. One more “mundane” problem that has bothered many people with the iPhone 3G is the development of cracks on the exterior of the device, without putting any real stress on it. The problem is apparently bad enough for the company to be taken to court, targeted by a suit that seeks class-action status.

The suit, filed in New York, alleges that Apple is doing nothing to solve the problem of hairline cracks appearing in the device. In extreme cases, people are reporting that the cracks are present when the phone is new out of the box, which would be beyond annoyance and entering the realm of a manufacturing defect.

The suit further alleges that Apple is well aware of the problem, and aware that there is a defect, and despite users being plagued by it has continued to allow the units to be sold with no fix mentioned.

Apple has issued a firmware update for users of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks who have been experiencing problems registering clicks on the new, buttonless trackpad. The issues started cropping up shortly after the new notebooks were introduced in October, but it is not clear how widespread the problem really is.

In any case, the company said it was looking into the issue two weeks ago and even Steve Jobs himself said in an email that the company was prepping a fix, which should now appear in Software Update for owners of the new systems. Apple’s release notes for the update can be found here.

The iPhone has striven to be on top of the market and since its release it has achieved, if only temporarily, the number one spot in numerous categories. It's sold amazingly well, has a huge profit margin and is quickly becoming one of the most popular smartphones in the world. Further proof of that is the sales figures for Q3, which put Apple in the lead over Motorola, LG and RIM.

According to recent data from NPD, the Apple iPhone 3G has topped the Motorola RAZR to become the leading handset, breaking a 36-month streak in which Motorola held on to the number one spot. That change, NPD says, is indicative of a change in demand, where people are now more apt to buy a phone based on both aesthetics and functionality, as opposed to simply aesthetics. The latter is an important note – the iPhone clearly has a lot of technical advantage over the RAZR. That is part of the reason it has a significant price premium over a RAZR V3. That difference in price is apparently becoming less important as people begin to enjoy the more feature-rich aspects of smartphones.

This bodes well for the smartphone market – the RAZR was sort of an in-between device, something that helped bridge the gap between vanilla mobiles and more complex portable PCs. Now we wait to see if Apple can retain this lead over Motorola the next quarter.

Is Sony is about to go DRM-free on the iTunes Store? Apple blog 9to5mac.com certainly believes so, but provides very little information other than saying they have a “hunch.” EMI is currently the only major label in iTunes Plus, so the addition of Sony BMG would be a major achievement for the company and leave Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group as the remaining Apple holdouts.

Despite Apple's willingness to sell DRM-free music, record labels besides EMI have withheld this ability from the company hoping to reduce Apple’s market share in digital music downloads. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the company in becoming the largest music retailer in the U.S. 9to5 Mac says the deal should happen within the next several weeks or months — leaving a nice wide open window – but if true, the company could announce the new agreement at Macworld San Francisco in January.

Apple introduced a substantial number of improvements and changes on its MacBook laptop line last month, both inside and out. Besides the better looks and thinner frame, the new MacBook's exterior design boasted of a stronger aluminum chassis and a large glass trackpad that could register multi-touch gestures, but most importantly it would act (the whole trackpad area) as a button instead of using a standard standalone button.

Now users that jumped in early and acquired the new laptops are complaining about the trackpad registering clicks erratically. A thread in Apple's official forum shows that a number users are having similar issues but it remains to be seen how widespread the problem really is, and whether it relies on the hardware itself or if it's a software problem. Apple is said to be investigating the issue but an official resolution has yet come out from the Cupertino-based company.

We've heard a few nasty stories about Apple's iPhone App Store, including app suppression and fights between developers and Apple over what is and what isn't kosher to have on the site. This most recent iteration of those battles is very interesting, as it seems that Apple refuses to allow the Opera Mini browser onto the App Store.

The reasoning, the article assumes, is because Opera Mini would be a direct competitor to Safari on the iPhone, and we already know that Apple has squelched other applications that competed directly with their own products. But clearly, not all browsers are built the same. People have preferences and people like to make choices about what software they use.

Could this turn into another fight between what Apple wants and what their users want? The success of the iPhone has much to do with the functionality of the phone, which has been helped dramatically by 3rd party applications. Apple might be shooting themselves in the foot with all these roadblocks in front of the App Store.

Apple's initial reluctance to provide an SDK for iPhone development was surely a mistake. Most people knew that from the beginning, but at least for Apple's sake hindsight is proving that releasing the SDK has had a positive impact on the platform. According to some sources, the SDK has increased demand for iPhone developers significantly, upwards of 500% in the past few months alone.

The largest increase in demand for iPhone developers came shortly after the Apple App Store opened, which no doubt drew both 3rd party companies and independent developers in. What's even more interesting is what some people see this leading up to, which includes accreditation for development. Could we see in the near future a "Certified iPhone Developer" program come out?

With a massive increase in developers, they also expect to see an increase in conflicts over intellectual property. This could easily happen between different developers, or between the developers and Apple. Apple has already proven they are willing to squelch any application they don't approve of on the App Store, which has included programs they feel "mimic" existing ones that they develop. Regardless, iPhone development has seen a huge surge, which is nothing but good news for the iPhone.

Originally making their name by building cheap Mac clones, Psystar has decided to venture into somewhat uncharted territory by one-upping Apple. The next iteration of Psystar clones will include a beefy graphics upgrade, a GeForce 9800 GT, and Blu-ray drives. The significance of this is that a Mac clone will have newer hardware before Apple has released it. Given how slow Apple has been on the uptake for Blu-ray, this is clearly Psystar trying to reach out to Mac users who feel Apple is making a mistake.

The arbitration between Apple and Psystar clearly hasn't stopped Psystar from running business as usual. This could be taken as a sign that Psystar doesn't expect to close their doors due to legal threats from Apple, or it could mean that they just want to sell absolutely as many clone machines as possible before they do get shut down. We won't know for sure until we hear about whatever is going on behind closed doors between the two companies.

Fans of either the iPhone or Google Earth (or perhaps both) will be interested in the latest development from Google. The search giant announced today the launch of Google Earth for the iPhone, with the port being made available through the iTunes App Store immediately. Having Google Earth on your phone sounds pretty cool on the surface, and on the iPhone it promises to be more than just a port of the PC version.

This mobile version capitalizes on the environment it is placed in, using the iPhone's built-in features to offer control. For instance, to adjust the angle of your view you actually tilt the phone itself. Navigation can be done using hand gestures as well, common for iPhone applications. Other features include geo-located Wikipedia articles and an instant “location” feature that will zoom in to where you happen to be standing at that moment.

From the included video in the blog post, the picture quality looks decent, about on par with the PC, though I doubt the actual speed of loading would be anywhere near what is demonstrated. The iPhone has been criticized in the past for slow download speeds, and Google Earth is definitely not a bandwidth-light app.