EverythingMac

Apple's iPhone has won another J.D Power award for customer satisfaction among consumers, after taking the business crown last year. J.D. Power and Associates released the results of a customer satisfaction study measuring consumer tastes on Thursday, and ranked the iPhone highest among smartphone consumers judging five factors: ease of operation, operating system, features, physical design, and battery function. Apple scored particularly well in everything but battery life, which appears to be a sore spot for iPhone owners. The iPhone received an overall score of 791 on a 1,000-point scale, ahead of LG's 772 points and Samsung's 759 points. The industry average was 751 points, and overall smartphone satisfaction rose since J.D. Power's last survey in November 2008, it said.

An Apple job posting suggests the company might be thinking about adding 3G wireless radios to future MacBooks. Apple's Mac Hardware Group is looking for a quality-assurance engineer with experience in the various networking technologies popular in the personal computing market, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, "and/or 3G Wireless WAN," according to the job posting spotted by Computerworld. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet are the standard network interfaces on the Mac at the moment, while 3G Wireless WAN is a technology confined just to the iPhone inside Apple. A few years ago, notebooks with embedded chips that could connect to cellular networks were thought to be the next big thing in mobile computing, but the concept didn't exactly pan out in the same way that Wi-Fi is now ubiquitous in notebook computing. But Apple may be considering a MacBook partnership with AT&T, given its close ties to the carrier through the iPhone. Rumors to that effect have surfaced before, and it might make sense that Apple would want to have some sort of tweak available for its MacBook lineup heading into the second half of the year.

iPhone clones (or iClones) are a dime a dozen, but this model caught my eye. Sold by Houston-based Beyond E-Tech, which also produces the Duet D888, the D-8 only would confuse someone who's been living in a bunker for the last three years. It's about the same size as the iPhone, but the display is much smaller (2.8 inches) to make room for a calling controls, a dedicated music player button, and what look like soft keys. And to be honest, while the D-8 apparently has an accelerometer, I'm not even sure the 65,000-color display is a touch screen. But look at those feature icons...they look almost the same. Like the D888, the D-8 is a dual-SIM card phone so you can make calls and send texts from two numbers on the same device. Other features on the unlocked world phone include an FM radio, mobile TV, a 2-megapixel camera, basic organizer features, messaging, Bluetooth, a speakerphone, and a music player.

AT&T may slash the price of its iPhone service plan by $10 when a new version of the touchscreen smartphone is launched this summer, according to a story on TheStreet.com. The article cited analyst Michael Cote of Cote Collaborative saying that there is a "strong possibility" that AT&T will drop the entry-level price of its service plan to $59 from $69. Apple is expected to unveil the latest iPhone on June 8 during the company's World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. AT&T declined to comment for this story, and Michael Cote did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview. The price cut would likely help make the iPhone, which now retails for $200 with a two-year service plan with AT&T, more appealing to more mainstream customers. I've been saying for quite some time that the biggest hurdle to widescale adoption of the iPhone or any other smartphone in the mainstream market is the high price tag of the service contracts.

Graphics chips will be tapped to accelerate more tasks in upcoming versions of Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems, according to Nvidia. In an interview Friday with Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia's Tesla products, Gupta described how new programming environments will tap into the latent compute horsepower of graphics processors to accelerate software in Apple's upcoming OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft's Windows 7 operating systems. Graphics chips aren't just for games anymore. The trend toward general-purpose graphics processing is defined by an acronym that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue: GPGPU. But the essence of General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units is pretty simple: use the scores--or even hundreds in higher-end chips--of processing cores inside GPUs to speed tasks that, in some cases, would be done much less efficiently by the central processing unit (CPU). Apple's upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard will tap into the compute power of graphics processors

As Apple celebrated, Microsoft canceled the company picnic. As Apple announced results that beat expectations, Microsoft had its first ever year-over-year dip in sales. As Apple announced a billion app downloads, Microsoft gritted its molars with a view to finally shaking a little of the smugness from Apple's chops. So you might be wondering, as you sip your weekend cocktail and ponder why the NBA playoffs are even longer than the regular season, just how much each company's advertising might have contributed to these slightly diverse results. In recent weeks, Microsoft has turned to a strategy of death by a thousand cuts (or, well, at least two) on the Apple brand. Macs are expensive. They're cool for drooling fools. Oh, and did we mention they're expensive? While Apple has kept on steadily associating Microsoft with turgid, virus-infested slop made by the poorly dressed and pitiful.

As analysts predicted it might, Microsoft on Thursday reported the company's first ever year-over-year sales decline for the quarter ended March 31. The software maker said fiscal third-quarter sales totaled $13.65 billion, down 6 percent compared with $14.45 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Its per-share earnings were 33 cents per share, although that included severance and investment impairment charges that reduced earnings by 6 cents per share. "While market conditions remained weak during the quarter, I was pleased with the organization's ability to offset revenue pressures with the swift implementation of cost-savings initiatives," Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said in a statement.