Yesterday, we found out about Apple's ranking in BusinessWeek's 50 Rankings, but when it comes to customer feedback, Apple's success is a completely different matter. How's that? Well, shareholders are very senzitive to the actions of the company, and they usually think in money, market share, revenue, but customers...they simply need innovation, cool design, reliability, excellent support for their products and, more often than I would think of, gadgets with the "Wow!" factor!


Some of the latest rumors say Apple is going to release a low-cost iPhone, and that should make shareholders happy, but now let's talk about the last survey where Apple managed to be the best - Brandchannel's poll regarding the brands with the greatest impact in people's lives...

Brandchannel.com asked about 2,000 students and professionals about the most important brands in their lives, and Apple managed to be named "the brand you’d most like to sit next to at a dinner party," "the brand that, if sent back in time 100 years, could have the biggest impact on the course of history," "the brand that inspires you the most," "if you could be a brand, what brand would you be?" "the brand you can’t live without," and "the brand that is most likely to revolutionize the branding industry in the next five years."

When it comes to various "top companies" listings, we usually see Apple ending up in the first part of the top, and seeing it grabbing only the 6th position in BusinessWeek 50 Rankings made me wonder "why," but most important of all, "who's above," so let's see...


First, if this sounds like something new to you, then you should know that the BusinessWeek 50 Rankings is the list of "the star performers in each of the 10 sectors that make up the S&P 500." Now, let's move on and see what do they say about Apple, because that's what really matters, after all.

"Apple launched its latest category-busting gadget, the iPhone, in 2007, and its shares more than doubled. But investors may be more focused now on the stock’s 28 percent plunge since the start of 2008: The Cupertino (Calif.) company has become the poster child for market fears of a slowdown in consumer spending. Chief Executive Steve Jobs has signaled that, despite any recession, Apple won’t be trimming its R&D budget. With $18 billion in cash on hand, many expect the product- obsessed Jobs to go on the offensive. He has already announced a corporate version of the iPhone."

OK, so now I got my answer to the "why" question - it's all about share price and fears that research and development spending may even make those shares' value go lower. Well, I guess research and development will repay their debts later, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

At last, here's the list of companies that got higher rankings than Apple - Coach, Gilead Science, Allegheny Technologies, Verizon and Questar. Hehe... I am sure a lot of you are glad Microsoft is not in the list, aren't you? ;)

Usually, Apple's software updates come at least two at once, and today it seems we also have some interesting news about the upcoming 10.5.3 version of Mac OS X, but until we get to that, we have to discuss about Aperture 2.1 and Apple TV 2.0.1, which both arrived Friday.


Since February, when Apple introduced Apple TV Take 2, with a completely new interface and support for iTunes movie rentals and streaming podcasts, there was no update until now.

Anyway, the update released Friday night is not documented by Apple, so it seems to be simply a minor maintenance update. For now, the only thing that seems new is the Genres category, located in My Movies, which allows you browse your media hub's content by type. If you see something else that has been added, don't hesitate to let us know!

Next, we have the update to Aperture, available for free, and including the Apple-developed plug-in, Dodge & Burn, which adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur, but the best part is that Aperture 2.1 now allows its users to use third party plugins easier than before, with the help of the new open plug-in architecture.

At last, it seems Apple started testing Mac OS X 10.5.3, the third major update to Leopard. The latest build, 9D10, already has over 75 bug fixes and code corrections, especially critical memory leaks in CoreAnimation and iCal, as well as various issues in Dashboard, Installer App, Spotlight indexing, and more.

Without any official date for release, the rumors go that Mac OS X 10.5.3 should arrive in April or May, but I guess we should wait and see. After all, it's better to have a later release, rather than an early one that skips fixing some problems, don't you agree?

Hacking for a living doesn't sound like a good thing, especially since you could end up in jail...or getting a job with some security company, if you are good enough, but being a security researcher and hacking just to prove that you are good is very nice...especially when you can get some money with this. The best part of this is...$10,000 in 2 minutes!


No, I didn't write that wrong, and nobody did anything illegal. A MacBook Air was hacked in 2 minutes by a team of security researchers, by using an undisclosed Safari vulnerability, and they got the $10k for this. Not bad at all!

During the "Pwn to Own" contest, sponsored by TippingPoint, Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel of Independent Security Evaluators, managed to gain control of a MacBook Air by using a web page previously set up by them, so I guess it didn't take only 2 minutes, after all.

For now, it's good to know that the "good guys" have discovered this vulnerability, but I don't want to think what could happen to some users when they do. Just...let's hope Apple will manage to fix this problem in time!

A few days ago, Apple announced a patent filling involving voice recognition, and one of their recent job announcements made me think about very interesting things to come... and despite the fact the following is nothing more but my personal expectations and some speculations of the facts we know, I think there are some chances to see Apple turning the dream into reality in the coming years.


What was I talking about? Well, think about the keyboard and the mouse - for a lot of Apple users, they are the weak link of the entire system, and I am not talking about those that end up returned to Apple for various problems...

The idea is this - Apple is currently hiring a new handwriting recognition engineer, and in the job description you can read that this person is going to be involved in "advancing Apple's handwriting recognition technology for Mac OS X." So far, so good, but what about taking out the keyboard and the mouse from the landscape of the future?

In my opinion, handwriting and speech recognition shouldn't be just additional features. I can't imagine how I will get used to use a computer without keyboard and mouse, but I would rather dictate my articles instead of writing them. In fact, a direct brain-to-computer would be even faster, but let's not go too far!

To end this, here's my prediction: in the next decade, maybe we'll have keyboards and mouses too but, at least in some high end or custom Macs, we could have only speech and handwriting recognition, as solutions to control the computer. What do you think - is this the way of the future, or not?