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When the sense of personal competition has gone, when time has passed, the memories become more acute and more accurate.

During Bill Gates' interview Sunday night with Charlie Rose on CBS's "60 Minutes," Microsoft's chairman released some emotion when speaking of visiting Steve Jobs during the Apple CEO's last days.

He said they're talked about what they'd learned and about families.

He said the conversation wasn't melancholy, but it clearly is an emotional memory for Gates.

When it came to business, Gates admitted that Apple "put the pieces" together on … Read more

Apple could be planning considerable changes to the way it handles warranties on its devices, according to a new report.

The iPhone, iPad and Mac maker is said to be planning a revamp of its basic AppleCare warranty service to become a subscription that will cover all the Apple devices a user owns. AppleCare currently has to be purchased on a per-gadget basis. According to AppleInsider the company held a meeting about the changes on Thursday and plans to roll them out this fall.

The report also claims that Apple is working on some behind-the-scenes changes to the way it … Read more

Pentagon employees may soon start using Apple mobile devices, like iPhones and iPads, on the U.S. Defense Department's secure network.

The department expects to clear the devices for use on its network early next week, Bloomberg reported Friday.

It's a space that's normally dominated by BlackBerry, but with other smartphone brands gaining popularity, the federal government is considering other options. Those options include Samsung, which officials cleared last week.

Approval means employees using government-issued iOS 6 devices can access military networks after the department builds a mobile-device management system to secure the phones and … Read more

Apple expanded the reach of one of its strongest security features to more users this week, following a limited rollout earlier this year.

Apple's two-step verification for its Apple ID account system is now in more than a dozen additional countries beyond the five it launched with in late March, 9to5Mac reports. Some of those newer countries include Canada, Mexico, Russia, and Italy.

The system sends a four-digit passcode by text message to a user's phone and must be used on top of a regular password. In practice, this could keep an account from being compromised by an … Read more

Microsoft on Friday said users shouldn't expect a version of Apple's iTunes that's been specialized for Windows 8's new Metro interface "anytime soon." Though if you've been paying attention to the battle between the two companies, it should come as no surprise that Apple's dragging its feet.

iTunes is an immensely popular piece of software on the PC, and has been since Apple ported it over from the Mac in 2003. There were always two key reasons for that: one was selling content from the iTunes Store, and the other was providing … Read more

Back in March, I read a story by The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg titled "How Apple gets all the good apps." It was mostly about why Apple's rivals -- Google, Microsoft, and others -- have brought their apps to the iOS platform while Apple didn't reciprocate the gesture.

Mossberg described the situation as obviously lopsided in Apple's favor and that it "stemmed from the different business models of the big rivals." Apple, after all, makes the "vast majority" of its money through hardware sales while Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, … Read more

Apple receives so many police demands to decrypt seized iPhones that it has created a "waiting list" to handle the deluge of requests, CNET has learned.

Court documents show that federal agents were so stymied by the encrypted iPhone 4S of a Kentucky man accused of distributing crack cocaine that they turned to Apple for decryption help last year.

An agent at the ATF, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, "contacted Apple to obtain assistance in unlocking the device," U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell wrote in a recent opinion. But, she wrote, … Read more

Android dominated the global smart mobile device market in the first quarter, according to a new report from Canalys.

That market -- which combines smartphones, tablets, and notebooks -- hit 308.7 million units in the first quarter, representing year-on-year growth of 37.4 percent, according to Canalys, which released the report on Thursday.

By operating system market share, Android was on top with 59.5 percent of all smart mobile devices shipped. Apple was second with a 19.3 percent share, while had Microsoft had an 18.1 percent share.

Global tablet shipments grew 106.1 percent year-on-year to … Read more

A federal judge in New York has dismissed a trademark lawsuit against Apple over its use of the term "iBooks."

Black Tower Press sued Apple in 2011, claiming that Apple's use of the term to describe its e-reader platform violated a trademark the small New York-based publisher acquired in 2006 and 2007. The publisher of science fiction and fantasy titles asserted that it acquired the trademark along with various assets of Byron Preiss, who had published more than 1,000 books under the "ibooks" brand starting in 1999.

The lawsuit acknowledged that Apple has a … Read more