Munir Kotadia is a journalist who specialises in internet security - and he’s had enough of security experts continued refusal to simply admit Macs are more secure.

“Have you noticed the most popular laptop brand on display at any security conference?,” he writes, “In my experience Apple Macs seem to make up significantly more than the five percent usually attributed to them.”

It goes on from there, with his chat with Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research, posted below. Read his report where he writes, “For years now I have heard security companies and analysts claim that Apple Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows and the only reason there is virtually no malware for the Mac is because it has such a tiny market share.”

He’s not buying it anymore....

Look, everyone knows this thing is the best desktop computer money can buy.  But that doens't mean we get sick of hearing about it.   Ken Mingis at Computerworld got his review in today and had some very interesting observations:

• It's important to note that the 27-in. model is $100 less than the $1,799 24-in. iMac that preceded it...or the $1799 30-inch Cinema Display that only has 10% more pixels.
• It is so good, it could bring back the desktop [nah!] But with an absolutely stunning screen, a lot of under-the-hood performance improvements, the wireless keyboard and the new mouse, and flexibility that makes it fit in at work or at home, this new iMac could lead to a resurgence in desktop sales for Apple.
• The screen, which manages to crowd in 109 pixels per inch, is the biggest selling point[Agree!]

Seriously, pretty fast Engadget.  

Some quick observations on the new Magic Mouse: It looks thinner than any mouse I've used before.  Will it feel like one of those mice that fits into your laptop's PC card slot? And I wonder how the right and left clicking action will be.  Remember, Apple isn't 100% awesome when it comes to mice.  Anyone remember Jobs unveiling the "Puck Mouse" as the next greatest thing?  Even the Mighty Mouse ball never worked perfectly for me - I reverted to a Logitech when the ball died.

Anyway, I'll judge it when we get to play with it - which I am excited about.

CNET went to town running Windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition of a MacBook Pro (to get exact hardware parity) and found that Snow Leopard was usually faster than Windows 7 and, at the same time, used less power. 

To be fair, Snow Leopard is optimized for Apple's hardware.  There is no way Microsoft can optimize Windows for all of its hardware partners' products.  Get the full scoup at CNET.

When in doubt, there’s always a security story somewhere and this one’s got something rather, erm, ‘special’ about it - it hits us right in our wallet...

See, internet banking is becoming de rigeur. It’s the nicest way to visit your overdraft or to watch the numbers growing on your credit card statement as those punitive borrowing rates slowly enhance your debt. (So, how is it again banks lost all that money), anyway - I digress - the story is that now Australian police are warning citizens ‘down under’ to belay use of Windows for internet banking, advising they use a Mac or Linux machine instead.

We're seen the pictures from their patent applictions (below) for a number of years.   We've even seen some pretty awesome mockups.  Is Apple about to release a new mouse with its new consumer products?

The numbers keep piling up for the App Store.  Today, Apple announced that the iPhone App Store downloads surpassed two billion and the number of apps available for download surpassed 85,000.  The App store hit a billion downloads in late April and turned a year old in July with 1.5 billion tallied. 

App Store by the Numbers:

2 Billion: Apps downloaded
85,000: Apps available
125,000: developers
50,000,000: iPhone and iPod touch customers
500,000,000: Apps this quarter alone
>10,000,000 Average apps per day average currently

Apple's Press release follows:

CUPERTINO, California—September 28, 2009—Apple® today announced that more than two billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. There are now more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone™ and iPod touch® customers worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program.

As we warned before 3.1 came out, the latest iPhone update disables the tethering hack that so many of you enjoy using.  That in itself is reason enough hold off on updating. 

However, today TUAW publishes some more discouraging news.  After the 3.1 update, non-iPhone 3GS users (touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G) won't be able to access Exchange servers for their Email, Contacts and Calendar if the Exchange connection has been set by their administrators with a forced device encryption connection.  Only iPhone 3GS devices now work in this mode.  Apple has said it improperly set up encryption on iPhone OS 3.0 which wasn't really encrypting the Exchange information.

Luckily, the Gmail Calendar and Contacts sync that uses Microsoft's ActiveSync API (to act like an Exchange Server) is not affected.

From the Toys section:

Best Buy offers the Western Digital 1TB My Book USB 2.0 External Hard Drive, model no. WDH1U10000A, for $64.99. Shipping adds $5.50, or opt for in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's $0.07/GB and the lowest total price we could find by $35. Sales tax is added where applicable.