New and Noteworthy: WSJ Apple TV review: Runs Mac OS, "classic Apple"; For security, you can?t beat Mac OS X; more

WSJ Apple TV review: Runs Mac OS, "classic Apple" Walt Mossberg offers a glowing review of the Apple TV, stating that the unit may do for TV what the iPod did for music. "We've been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it's a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant. [...] we fully expect Apple to add the capability to stream or download a variety of content directly from the Internet, and that this new capability will be available on current Apple TV boxes through software updates." More.

For security, you can?t beat Mac OS X A quick ZDNet blog post points out the following: "Today we know of over 236,000 malicious malware items. These are mostly meant for the MS-Windows environment. Only about 700 are meant for the various Unix/Linux distributions. Current known Mac OSX malware count is even less with 7 [...] Let's take a second or two to digest those numbers.236,000 v. 700 v. 7 ? no matter what way you cut those numbers, that means a lot of Windows-based malware seeking out new hosts and almost none targeting Mac OS X users." More.

Stocks: Apple vs. Starbucks The Motley Fool chooses between Starbucks and Apple in "Stock Madness 2007!," based on numbers, employee satisfaction and more. "Great. Choose between Starbucks and Apple? Why not ask me to choose which of my three children is my favorite? [...] Both Apple and Starbucks are great companies. But Starbucks deserves your vote in this contest. History says that the shares of a proven Rule Maker, with an improving business, can't stay down for long. Meanwhile, the shares of a former Rule Breaker, trading ever higher on expectations for perfect products from imperfect management, may finally be ripe for a fall." More.

Motorola may buy Palm CNBC reports on speculation that Motorola will announce plans to purchase Palm as early as this week. "A major Palm shareholder fully anticipates that Motorola will announce plans to buy the company in a deal valued at roughly $2 billion as early as tomorrow, hours before Palm is expected to release its quarterly financial report. A Palm spokesperson refused to comment on what she called rumor and speculation." More.

Intel-based CS3 sees "significant performance gains" Ars Technica reports that during their most recent quarterly earnings call, Adobe president Shantanu Narayen took several opportunities to mention big performance gains that they are seeing while running CS3 products on Intel-based Macs. "As an example, in response to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's question about any possible co-promotions with Apple: 'Apple is clearly one of the most important ones. We've seen tremendous performance improvements with our new applications on the new Mactel hardware. So, they are very excited.'" More.

Previously on MacFixIt:

• Mac OS X 10.4.9 (#6): Final Cut Express 2.0.x: Capture issues; Secure site access problems: Another fix; more
• Apple TV now shipping

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