Apple has been working fast and furious with the updates lately, knocking out two quick iOS 6.1 patches in less than a week along with a flurry of similar improvements for the Mac, two of which get the spotlight in our Tuesday recap. We've also got some sad news on Microsoft Office for Mac pricing and hey, there's a new version of Firefox ready to install as well, so let's get right to it...
Apple was certainly a busy beaver on Tuesday where updates are concerned, which included a minor update that brings iTunes to version 11.0.2. So what do we get for our download? In addition to the usual stability and performance improvements, the update adds "a new Composers view for music, improves responsiveness when syncing playlists with a large number of songs, and fixes an issue where purchases may not show up in your iTunes library." Okay, nothing earth-shattering there, but so far our iTunes feels a little more stable -- we've had a consistent problem with iTunes 11 randomly forgetting our non-music iTunes in the Cloud purchases, and this update seems to have cleared it up (for now)...
Macworld is reporting that Microsoft really, really wants its Office customers to adopt its new 365 subscription model -- and one way to nudge people in that direction is by quietly raising the price of the boxed copies. While no one was paying attention, the folks in Redmond raised Office for Mac prices by as much as 17 percent, also eliminating multi-license packages of the popular productivity suite. A single license of Office for Mac Home & Student now costs $140 (up from $120), while Office for Mac Home & Business adds $20 to the original $200 price tag. Instead, Microsoft is clearly hoping you'll instead purchase Office 365 Home Premium at a cost of $100 per year or $10 per month, or Office Small Business Premium for $150 per user per year -- not much of a bargain compared to buying a boxed copy for just one computer.
As promised on Tuesday, Apple has released a Java for OS X 2013-001 update to plug the security hole that allowed hackers to attack the company's own computers. The update patches Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_41, also improving reliability and compatibility as well as making Mac users feel more safe in general. Note that the update will disable the Java SE 6 applet plug-in if you haven't already installed the previous Java for OS X 2012-006, in which case you'll need to download the latest version direct from Oracle. (The software will point you in the right direction.)
Gosh, it doesn't feel like six weeks already, but it must be, because Firefox 19 has arrived and is ready for your downloading pleasure. The big news with this version is the inclusion of a built-in PDF viewer at long last (what took them so long?), but the update also brings improvements to startup performance on top of a cavalcade of developer and HTML5 bug fixes. But we don't have to sell you on this one -- if you're a Firefox fan, you probably stopped reading when you saw the headline and headed straight to the download link anyway, right?
It's always fun to note a new milestone in Apple's stock price, but how often do we get to do that for rival Google? According to BGR, the search giant indeed hit one of those milestones on Tuesday, with its stock price soaring past $800 per share for the first time ever, closing at $806.85 by day's end. That's a 1.76 percent increase which doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind Google's last stock price milestone was more than five years ago when it briefly hit $700 per share. Ironically, Google's $100 per share increase since December appears to come at the expense of Apple, whose stock dropped nearly 20 percent to land under $500 per share.
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MacMike
February 20, 2013 at 11:17am
For years Microsoft has been sticking it to consumers and businesses by overcharging for what is essentially a word processor, a spreadsheet tool and a lousy presentation app called PowerPoint. Worse yet, most people think they need to use this software and continue to buy it. People - there are free or lower cost alternatives that will play nice with the Microsoft format such as NeoOffice, Open Office or even Apple's iWork suite. Stop overpaying Microsoft for these products. They're counting on consumer ignorance to maintain their margins.
