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According to Web analytics firm Net Applications (via Computerworld) Apple's OS X Mountain Lion is now the most popular version of OS X, just five months after its July 2012 release.

During December, 32% of all Macs that went online were running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Usage of Lion, the previous iteration of OS X, dropped from 30% to 28%.


OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, first introduced in 2009, remains widely used despite its age. As of December 31, it still represented 29% of Mac Internet usage. Snow Leopard remains for sale on the online Apple Store and has been lauded for its stability.

Easily accessible and reasonably priced upgrades have always enticed Apple users to embrace operating system updates. Apple famously boasted about selling a million copies of OS X 10.7 Lion in its first day of availability, and Mountain Lion also saw rapid adoption numbers.


Net Applications collects its data by tracking browser usage of 160 million monthly visitors from around the world on approximately 40,000 websites, offering a picture of the active user base of browsers and platforms at any moment.

A bug in Google's text-to-speech engine is causing Google Now and Google Translate to interject the phrase "he now praises the iPad" into sentences that end using phrases such as "end with," "enraged with," and "filled with."

The mysterious phrasing, which first came about in October 2012 on the Android support page, was publicized by Hacker News last night, resulting in some hilarious sentences.

One altered spoken sentence, for example reads, "Larry Page used to use an Android. But that is now at an end, he now praises the iPad."


This bug can be easily reproduced using Google Translate. Type any sentence, end it with one of the key words, and the text-to-speech option on the site will add "he now praises the iPad" to the sentence.

There's no word on why this phrasing exists in the code, but Hacker News speculates that it is an error in the algorithm. The original sentence came from a MacNN article posted in 2011, quoting Hearst Magazine president David Carey: "Describing the negotiations last spring as being filled with 'so much drama,' he now praises the iPad."


Theoretically, Google's algorithm improperly incorporated this sentence, causing the bug. Thus far, Google has not resolved the problem, so for the time being, Google Now and Google Translate can still be used to create humorous sentences.

More than $600,000 worth of counterfeit Lighting cables were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a routine customs search in Anchorage, Alaska (via 9to5Mac). The cables had arrived from China via plane and were designed to look like Apple's $19 Lightning to USB cables, complete with fake Apple logos and UL icons.

But the knock-off logos weren't enough of a disguise. The items stood out as counterfeits, Frank Falcon, CBP spokesman said. They were packaged for retail sale in cardboard blister packs that were sub-standard compared to Apple's trademark white packaging.

Falcon said a manufacturer in China is responsible for the shipment. He noted that while it is “difficult to deal with a manufacturer in another country,” the bust will “bring more scrutiny” to future shipments from the company.

This is a large bust for such products. As one can imagine, over $600,000 in cables and adaptors means there was “quite a bit of stuff” seized, Falcon said.

Apple products are frequently counterfeited, and even Apple's retail stores are sometimes knocked off.

Former Apple employee Don Melton is sharing a unique look behind the scenes of the Safari development team. Melton was the team leader on both the Safari and WebKit products that are now used by millions of users on both iOS, the Mac, and Windows.

Previously, Melton explained how the Safari name came about, but today he shares the tale of Safari's User Agent string and the strategies his team used to keep the project under wraps.

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

When a Web browser fetches a page from a Web server, the browser identifies itself to that server with a user agent string — basically its name, version, platform, etc. The browser also gives the server an IP address so the server knows where to return the page. This exchange not only makes the Web work, it also allows the server to tell who is using what browser and where they’re using it.

You can see where this is going, right? But wait, there’s more…

Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. That’s right, Apple has 16,777,216 static IP addresses. And because all of these addresses belong together — in what’s now called a “/8 block” — every one of them starts with the same number. In Apple’s case, the number is 17.

IP address 17.149.160.49? That’s Apple. 17.1.2.3? Yes, Apple. 17.18.19.20? Also, Apple. 17.253.254.255? Apple, dammit!

I was so screwed.

Melton's blog has the rest of the details about how his team kept things quiet before the big reveal.

The Wall Street Journal notes that several retailers including Best Buy and Toys "R" Us have complained to attorneys general in a handful of states about advertising practices of Walmart. Generally, the complaints stem from comparison ads by Walmart in which competitors assert that Walmart is using inaccurate pricing or non-equivalent items to claim that it offers the lowest pricing.


But Best Buy also alleges that Walmart was deceptive with its iPhone 5 holiday sale in which it dropped pricing to $127, although the article quotes $150 pricing.

Best Buy said it lost about $65,000 in profit the day Wal-Mart's promotion first ran on Facebook, because it was compelled to match Wal-Mart's advertised $150 price, even though it concluded that Wal-Mart didn't actually have a sufficient number of iPhones available.

Walmart claims that it did have sufficient stock of the iPhone 5, quoting 98% availability at its stores carrying the device. Walmart had noted as the sale launched that it was working closely with Apple on the promotion and was securing significant numbers of iPhones, but that the sale was first-come, first-served with no rain checks offered at stores where the device was out of stock.

Best Buy had already been selling the iPhone 5 for $149.99 when Walmart announced its own sale, but it is unclear if Best Buy used the $73 difference from regular price or $23 difference from Best Buy's sale price in calculating its profit loss. Assuming the latter, Best Buy would have price matched on approximately 2800 iPhone 5 sales in one day.

BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield is predicting that Apple will debut its long-rumored Pandora-like iRadio service to compliment iTunes at some point in 2013. Previously, there were reports that Apple and the major music labels weren't close in negotiations, but Greenfield says they're still negotiating on song catalogs.

"Consumer behavior (is) increasingly shifting toward access to a music catalog from ownership of specific songs. We expect iRadio to be incorporated into the iTunes iOS app with personalized radio functionality akin to Pandora, integrated with iTunes to purchase music and other music related content such as concert information/tickets/merchandise via Live Nation (LYV) and Ticketmaster."

Back in October, Bloomberg reported that Apple and music labels had re-entered intense negotiations and iRadio was set to debut in early 2013. CNET then reported in December that the sides were far apart because Apple's terms left them "cold."

Apple SVP of Internet Services and Software is considered Apple's "master negotiator" for content deals, so any potential negotiations with music labels would likely go through him. Greenfield also predicts that Apple's long-rumored Apple TV wouldn't debut in 2013 because of content restrictions.

Open Road Films has announced that it is the distributor for the Ashton Kutcher-led film jOBS will receive a full release in April of this year, reports Deadline.

Directed by Joshua Michael Stern, written by Matthew Whitely, shot by Oscar- winning cinematographer Russell Carpenter and produced by Mark Hulme, jOBS details the major moments and defining characters that influenced Steve Jobs on a daily basis from 1971 through 2000. jOBS plunges into the depths of his character, creating an intense dialogue-driven story that is as much a sweeping epic as it is an immensely personal portrait of Steve Jobs’ life. The filmmakers were granted unprecedented access during shooting to the historic garage in Palo Alto, that served as the birthplace to Apple Inc. jOBS stars Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, Lukas Haas, J.K. Simmons and Matthew Modine. Inferno Entertainment is handling international sales on jOBS.

The film will premier at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah later this month.

Corning, provider of the Kentucky-made glass for the iPhone and iPad, has announced the third iteration of its Gorilla Glass panels. The glass both reduces scratches and increases overall strength significantly.

Gorilla Glass 3 has been improved at the molecular level, incorporating a proprietary feature called Native Damage Resistance (NDR). According to Corning, NDR reduces the propagation of flaws, the appearance of scratches and does a better job of maintaining the overall retained strength of the glass. As a result, GG3 claims a three-fold improvement in scratch resistance, 40 percent reduction in the number of visible scratches and 50 percent boost in retained strength after the glass becomes flawed.

Gorilla Glass was mentioned in the Steve Jobs biography with Jobs personally calling Corning Glass CEO Wendell Weeks, before the first iPhone launched, to request the company begin to scale production of Gorilla Glass for the device.

Gorilla Glass 2 was announced at CES last year. It seems likely that Apple will adopt the improved glass for future iOS devices.

Corning will also announce new optical Thunderbolt cables, available in lengths up to 30 meters. Earlier this week, Japanese firm Sumitomo Electric Industries announced its own optical Thunderbolt cables.

As noted by The Guardian earlier this week, the netbook industry will be winding down in the first quarter of 2013, as major players Asus and Acer will be shutting down production of the tiny notebooks.

Actually, the number sold in 2013 will be very much closer to zero than to 139m. The Taiwanese tech site Digitimes points out that Asus, which kicked off the modern netbook category with its Eee PC in 2007, has announced that it won't make its Eee PC product after today, and that Acer doesn't plan to make any more; which means that "the netbook market will officially end after the two vendors finish digesting their remaining inventories."

Asustek and Acer were the only two companies still making netbooks, with everyone else who had made them (including Samsung, HP and Dell) having shifted to tablets.

The report points to four factors that likely contributed to the demise of the netbook: the overall PC market including the rise of more powerful ultrabooks, the global economy, poor profit margins on netbooks, and the iPad leading a charge of tablets to the market.

Going a bit further, Slate argues that Apple is the primary culprit in the demise of the netbook, with the MacBook Air and iPad squeezing netbooks from both sides and leading to a transformation in personal computing.

Apple alone stood against the tide of netbooks. Apple’s brilliant insight was that despite netbooks’ popularity, nobody really wanted a netbook per se. Instead, Apple realized that people who were buying netbooks were looking for one of two things—they wanted full-fledged laptops that were very portable, or they wanted cheap machines that allowed them to easily surf the Web, use email and do other light computing tasks. Rather than building a single netbook that fit both these audiences poorly, Apple built two machines that were, each in its own way, much better than any netbook ever sold.

Slate's Farhad Manjoo goes on to note that Apple simply couldn't compete in the netbook market given the pricing model, and it had no interest in building an inferior product in an attempt to do so. Steve Jobs himself said at the iPad's introduction in 2010 that netbooks were simply a non-starter for Apple.

If there's going to be a third category of device it is going to have to be better at doing these types of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone; otherwise it has no reason for being. Now, some people have thought 'that's a netbook!' The problem is that netbooks aren't better at anything. They're slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky old PC software. So they're not better than a laptop at anything, they're just cheaper. They are just cheap laptops. And we don't think that they're a third category of device.

With the MacBook Air and iPad emerging as Apple's alternatives the entire computer industry was spurred to follow its lead, ultimately squeezing netbooks out of existence.

Facebook will update its Facebook Messenger app later today, adding two significant new voice-related abilities, reports The Next Web. The first will allow Facebook users to record a voice message to send to friends in addition to the standard text and photo messages.

The second is potentially more significant -- though is currently in limited beta testing for Canadian iOS users only. Facebook users will now have the option to make a VoIP phone call from one user to another.

Facebook has also said it will also begin the beta testing of a new VoIP calling feature within its iOS Messenger app, allowing users to establish a peer-to-peer connection and make calls without making a dent in their call allowance (although it will use existing data plans).

The only drawback is that voice calls (messages are available to all) will be available to Canadian users of the iOS Messenger app at launch.

To use the service, Canadian users will be able to log into their Messenger app, open a conversation with the person they want to call, hit the ‘i’ button in the top-right corner and selecting ‘Free Call.’ To send and receive calls, users will need to have the latest version of the app that is available today.

Facebook's efforts create a calling system that can potentially reach its more than 1 billion users, providing a massive competition to other VoIP services like Skype.

Facebook Messenger for the iPhone is a free download from the App Store. [Direct Link]

A previous version of this article said it was the Facebook iOS app that was updated. It is the standalone Facebook Messenger app that gained the new voice features.