The case has provided more drama than expected, with nostalgic discussions of Steve Jobs and a concession on Wednesday by US District Judge Denise that the issues have “somewhat shifted” during the trial and that “things change.” Cote had earlier raised eyebrows during a pre-trial hearing when she said her “tentative view” was that the government would prove an illegal conspiracy.

Wednesday also saw Google and Amazon file new petitions asking that Cote require Apple to redact sales information from the public exhibits that Apple will put on the court record. Amazon wants to redact certain of its print sales as well as the growth rate of free ebooks between 2009 and 2011.

Google, meanwhile, complains that Apple wants to “splash some of the most confidential Google material onto the public record.” The company also describes itself as a “very small rival in ebooks” and asks the court to protect it from “serious competitive harm.”

My colleague, Laura Owen, will be at the trial in New York today and will have highlights from closing arguments. Judge Cote will issue her decision in the coming weeks or months.

Here’s Google’s petition to keep its revenue share with publishers a secret:

Google Petition to Redact

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Horace Dediu made some calculations and plotted all of the data on a chart over at his Asymco blog:

Source: Asymco

Based on these latest numbers, Dediu calculated how much iTunes users spend per year on different types of media. He says it’s “about $9/yr on Software, $2/yr on books, $16/yr on apps $12/yr on music and $4/yr on video.”

On one hand, this chart backs up something we already know: that iOS apps — via a growing number of iPhone and iPad users — has been driving those iTunes account signups. As new subscribers arrive, the category of spending seeing the most growth is apps, at $16 per user, per year. In 2008, when the App Store opened, users were only spending about $4 per year apiece on apps; that number has quadrupled in almost six years.

But what’s interesting is that even though Apple says there have been 1 billion TV episodes downloaded and 380 million movies, that number spent per user is still relatively small, hovering around $4 per user, per year. (That’s about the price of one movie download on iTunes, btw.) And that’s even with the advent and growth of the Apple TV.

Ebooks are still the smallest category, and also Apple’s newest. However, the fact that so little — just $2 per user, per year — is spent on them in iTunes makes Apple’s recent claim that it has 20 percent of the ebook market seem a bit questionable.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”

Here are the currently available options that will allow you to view and edit your Office documents on Apple’s tablet.

Mobile Office for iPhone, scaled up

While it is true that the existing Office app does not have a custom user interface for the iPad, the iPhone version of Microsoft’s Mobile App can be installed and run on the iPad with 2x video scaling. This may seem a little awkward at first, but you can gain access to all of the features offered on the iPhone version of the app.

While the Word document editor does not scale well by pinching and zooming using the iPad’s 2x video scaling, the Excel and PowerPoint editors do a much better job. You can zoom in an out of both Excel and PowerPoint documents to gain a better view of the document on the iPad.

If you are an Office 365 subscriber, the main advantage in using this versus the web versions of Office apps is that you can store and access your files for offline editing. Unfortunately the features available in the native iPhone app are a bit lacking when compared to their Web App versions.

Office Web Apps for mobile browsers

Microsoft’s free Office Web Apps work just fine within Safari on the iPad. Better, in fact, since they have many features the official iPhone app lacks. For instance, the editor for Word in the web version has more features than the iOS native version.  Features like being able to change the font, adjust the document’s margins, insert tables, and even change the selected text’s style.

The major problem using Microsoft’s web apps for Office is that you cannot access the apps, or any of the files for that matter, without an internet connection.  So you either have a more fully featured web app that requires internet access, or a lightweight native iPhone app that can work with your documents offline.

A minor annoyance is that when you run Office on the web from within Safari, you still have Safari’s toolbar as well as its tab bar present at the top of the screen. This is true even when adding a shortcut link to any one of Microsoft’s web apps on the home screen. Someone needs to inform Microsoft how to set the Apple-specific meta tag keys to enable full-screen mode in online Office. Until then, there are browser alternatives like Atomic ($1.99 Universal),  Mercury ($0.99, Universal) and Dolphin (Free, iPad) that will allow you to enter into full- screen browsing mode with a single tap. It works very much like the iPhone version of Safari that does support full-screen browsing, in landscape mode only.

SkyDrive app for sharing links

Microsoft only supports SkyDrive as a storage option for iOS users that access either the mobile or web app versions of Office. If you are using SkyDrive as your document repository, the dedicated SkyDrive (free, Universal) app for iOS supports viewing Office documents. You can even download the documents for viewing when you are not connected to the internet.

The one unique thing you can do from within the SkyDrive app is create links for sharing SkyDrive documents with others. Sharing links to documents can be a more effective means of sending documents as the URL can be passed along via private Twitter message, a Facebook message, or even an SMS text message.  The Office Mobile for iPhone app can only email the document as an attachment.

If you are only interested in viewing your Office documents on your iPad, there are alternatives that support more than just one SkyDrive account. GoodReader ($4.99, iPad) will allow you to connect to multiple SkyDrive accounts as well as Dropbox, SugarSync, Google Drive, Box, and any other WebDAV, AFP, SMB, FTP or SFTP server. While it may appear that an app like GoodReader is all you could ask for, keep in mind that the one thing it does not do is create a link to the document on SkyDrive to share with others.

Office² HD for tracking changes

What I believe is the best Office document solution available on the iPad today is Byte²’s Office² ($7.99, iPad). Like GoodReader, it offers online access to a wide variety of storage solutions. And like the web version of Microsoft’s Office apps, it supports a full set of editing features for all Office documents.  If you are either a DataViz DocsToGo Premium or a QuickOffice Pro HD user, you owe it to yourself to take a look at what Office² has to offer — it has many of the advanced features you are likely looking for.

One such feature is the ability to track changes when editing your Word documents. Being a native app, you can also download your documents and edit them offline. Office² also looks great on the iPad and gives you maximum screen real estate for editing. While you can email a document as an attachment like you can in the Office for iPhone app, you cannot share a link to your SkyDrive documents as you can in the native SkyDrive app for iOS.

You don’t need an Office 365 subscription to use Office² as a documents editor on your iPad.  This is similar to how things work with the documents you store on SkyDrive and edit while online with the free Web Apps for Office.  You only need a subscription if you want to use Microsoft’s  Office Mobile for iPhone app to edit your documents offline.

Apple costs for Office

For Apple users, when you do sign up for an Office 365 account, you only get access to the previously available Office 2011 for Mac.  Chances are you already have this version installed on your Mac.  What you do not get is access to the Office on Demand feature that allows you to download full versions of the office suite onto any Mac you may be using; this feature is for Windows only.  Since you can still pick up a 3- install, 3-user, never-expiring license of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac on Amazon for $125, it hardly seems worth it to start spending the current annual subscription rate of $99 per year for exactly the same product.

For now at least, the best solution for viewing and editing your Microsoft Office documents on your iPad is to use GoodReader if you just want to view your files, and Office² if you want to edit them.  The only Microsoft app that you may need to install on your iPad is the native SkyDrive app, as it is the only way to share links to documents that you have stored on your SkyDrive account.  In a nutshell, Microsoft’s Office 365 just is not quite ready for the Apple platform.  Not yet at least.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• A look back at mobile in Q1
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Understatement may not be Black Pearl’s thing, but the company has some impressive creds to back up those big words: Black Pearl CEO Tim Bucher used to be in charge of engineering at Apple, where he played a key role in products like the Mac mini and the iPod. Content CTO Scott Smyers was a long-time Sony executive who also founded and led the DLNA consortium.

Senior Systems Engineer Joseph Palmer was in charge of hardware engineering at Danger. Co-founder Ain McKendrick also co-founded Palm. UX Director Jeff Ma designed the user interface of the Apple TV. Founding team member Greg Orzell used to be Cloud Architect at Netflix.

The list goes on. LinkedIn includes close to 40 people currently working for Black Pearl Systems, and the roster of employees reads a bit like a who’s who of digital media and mobile hardware development. The company was able to hire a total of 15 people away from Netflix, including both device and cloud specialists. A number of people worked for Danger at some point of their career, and Apple, YouTube, Microsoft, TiVo, Roku and Amazon’s secretive LAb126 R&D unit are all represented as well.

So what does Black Pearl do? It’s a very secretive stealth company, but I’ve been talking to sources, scouring job offers, Linkedin profiles, trademark applications and other bits of information, and here’s what I’ve been able to gather:

• Black Pearl Systems is a hardware company. The startup recently became a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, and it has already booked a suite for the 2014 CES in Las Vegas.
• One of its first hardware products will likely be an Android tablet. I’ve seen photos of a tablet that looks remarkably similar to the phased-out Sony Tablet S, complete with the slanted look that made the S a great coffee table product – which is where Black Pearl wants its hardware product to sit.
• There’s apparently also going to be a companion device that matches the tablet in colors, and is in all likelihood going to be used to stream content wirelessly to your TV.
• This is about way more than just hardware. A bunch of folks at Black Pearl have serious cloud creds, and the company is looking to hire more cloud and big data people “to build massively scalable services that will act as the brains for a seamless user experience across billions of connected devices,” as one of the job offers on its home page states.
• To that effect, Black Pearl is also building apps for existing Android and iOS mobile devices, as well as apps for PCs and Macs.
• The company has registered a number of trademarks in recent weeks, including for terms like “home data center,” “personal data center,” “data fabric” and “data mesh.” Doesn’t really sound like a brand for anything you’d expect to buy one day? Then how about this one: Last month, Black Pearl filed a trademark registration for “Lyve.”
• These guys really like that whole pirate theme. Not only is the company’s logo a pirate ship, word is that there’s a life-sized cardboard cutout of Jack Sparrow in Black Pearl’s office.

What does all of this mean? My hunch is that Black Pearl is working on some kind of home media platform that’s based on Android and extends to your existing mobile devices. Something like a Sonos, but for all your media. Or kind of like Plex, but for people who aren’t geeks.

The centerpiece may be a dedicated media tablet that doubles as a remote control and connects your TV screen to the cloud, and your existing devices will hook into the platform and be able to get your media instantly, where ever you are.

Of course, that’s just an educated guess — but I’m pretty sure Black Pearl Systems is up to something big.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• TV Apps: Evolution from Novelty to Mainstream
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013

That’s the problem Gord Mangione, the former Microsoft exec in charge of SQL Server before moving on to XenSource and Citrix, is attacking with Tipbit, his Seattle-based startup that’s emerging from stealth this week. For Mangione, the tipping point was search. He could never find what he needed on his device — not on his current iPhone and not on the Blackberry he used before. That inability to find what he wanted fast led inexorably to Tipbit, which has about $2 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and employees.

“Data is locked in different apps and the amount of email I can store locally is insufficient. All I do on my phone is read mail, delete the messages I don’t care about and wait to get to my ‘real’ machine to do anything useful in business,” Mangione said in a recent interview. The problem now is that the smartphone has become that “real” machine. And it’s of limited utility because, in Mangione’s words, “search remains terrible and I’m constantly switching between apps to find what I want. Why is the calendar, contacts and email all separate on an iPhone? Why can’t it all be in a single app?”

He’s hoping that Tipbit will be that single aggregation point to serve up what you need about your next meeting, your last email, quickly and unobtrusively. Users can keep using Gmail but have to allow Tipbit on grant it read-only access (via OAth authentication) to their various LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts. From all that information, Tipbit creates a private index in the cloud, accessible only by you.

“To make this work we have to index –but not store — your email,” Mangione said. Once that’s done, you can, with a single swipe option, bring up all the relevant information for an upcoming event. If you’re about to meet with Bill Gates, for example, you can pull up all the messages relevant to that meeting, what he’s been tweeting about, what his LinkedIn profile says, Google searches about him, all in one place.

“Back at Microsoft before we met with press, PR would hand us a backgrounder with all the information about that reporter — what they covered, what they last wrote etc. This is the same idea,” Mangione said.

Right now, Tipbit is for iPhone only and folks can use it for free — without fear of ads. The idea is once folks start using Tipbit in a business context,  to start charging the company for that use.

About two months ago, the company decided to go “hardcore on mobile only,” Mangione said because that’s where the action is.

He cited figures that showed that two years ago 55 percent of all messages were read on a desktop machine. Fast forward to last month when 23 percent of all messages opened were read on iPhones alone. And less than 20 percent were read on Microsoft Outlook.

There are other tools out there to help make sense of the iPhone firehose. Sunrise, for example, just updated its iOS calendar app to integrate Foursquare, Crunchbase and other site info, but the idea behind the more business-focused Tipbit is to bring in calendar, news, email and other data all into one place.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

In a paper published this month, the trio of researchers writes:

We show that Apple iOS generates weak default passwords which makes the mobile hotspot feature of Apple iOS susceptible to brute force attacks on the WPA2 handshake. More precisely, we observed that the generation of default passwords is based on a word list, of which only 1,842 entries are taken into consideration. In addition, the process of selecting words from that word list is not random at all, resulting in a skewed frequency distribution and the possibility to compromise a hotspot connection in less than 50 seconds.

Basically, the list the passwords for protecting the iPhone’s mobile hotspot are drawn from is just too small. And the “randomly generated” passwords are not random enough, according to their findings, which makes the passwords incredibly easy to crack for someone who knows what they’re donig.

To be clear, it’s the Wi-Fi hotspot protection that has been found to be weak — not the main password for the iPhone. But it’s still a vital security concern: if someone can get into your internet connection, it can attack devices that are connected to it.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report concerns Wi-Fi password security in iOS 6, so Apple has an opportunity to fix the problem before the public release of iOS 7 sometime this fall.

Don’t feel too smug if you’re using something other than an Apple device. The researchers note that the iPhone’s hotspot isn’t the only one at risk: “Spot tests show that other mobile platforms are also affected by similar problems.” That includes Windows 8, which by default uses only eight-digit passwords, and modified versions of Android: “[W]hile the official version of Android generates strong passwords, some vendors modified the Wi-Fi related components utilized in their devices and weakened the algorithm of generating default passwords.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing

HBO Go is only available to HBO subscribers, so this isn’t a solution for cord-cutters. However, it’s good for those who want to access to the cable channel’s backlog of content: customers can watch any of HBO’s shows at any time via the HBO Go channel on Apple TV. HBO Go has already been available for Apple’s mobile devices and on competing platforms Roku and Xbox 360.

WatchESPN is also a subscriber-only channel. Those who are signed up via their local cable provider can watch programming on Apple TV from across the company’s channels: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN3, curated clips from ESPN.com and others.

There are some limitations, however: DirecTV and Charter subscribers won’t be able to watch HBO Go on Apple TV, and DirecTV and Dish subscribers similarly will not be able to access WatchESPN on the device, AllThingsD reports.

Three other channels are also coming. The U.K.’s SkyNews will be viewable on demand or live in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland. Programming from Japan’s Crunchyroll, an anime and news channel, will be available worldwide one hour after airing. Music channel Qello has free and paid subscriptions available.

None of this makes Apple TV a viable cable replacement for fans of premium content and live sports, because Apple TV still requires that pesky cable subscription. However, Apple is slowly but surely broadening its living room play to compete with Xbox, Roku and others. Apple’s longterm TV strategy is still very much TBD, but this is a good move toward getting Apple customers used to the idea of watching their favorite content via the Apple TV and not live via a cable TV subscription.

With the announcement of new content, Apple also gave the latest stats on iTunes downloads: 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies have been purchased in total. Meanwhile, 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies are bought each day.

This post was updated with more information at 7:30 a.m. PT and again at 8:45 a.m. with details about cable subscriber limitations.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration

Phill Ryu, co-founder of Impending

Ever since the iOS App Store launched in 2008 and became a new distribution method for independent mobile developers worldwide, the notion of what an app is worth — and what developers should charge for an app – has changed. At first, if you wanted to be paid for your work in the iOS App Store, you simply put a price on the software — around 99 cents — and if your app was any good, saw the money (well, 70 percent of the money) start to come in.

But the golden age of the paid app is very much in the past. If you want to make money — especially if you’re making a game, like Ryu — the trend for the last several years (which still holds true today) is the free-to-play/freemium model. In-app purchases allow developers to put their apps on the Store for “free” and charge for upgrades within the app. Just about a quarter of revenue from iPhone apps in the U.S. come from paid apps — but nearly three quarters of iPhone app revenue comes from apps that are free with in-app purchases, according to Distimo.

There’s also plenty of anecdotal evidence that the companies that do the best with this model tend to be larger companies and not smaller, independent developers. The failure of Gasketball and Bombcats are some of the best-known examples of independent game disappointments — from a revenue perspective. The problem hasn’t been getting critical praise or promotion from Apple, as those and Outwitters’ flameout showed last year. The problem is in betting enough people will pay for things inside games to make up for all the freeloaders — also known as the Zynga model.

Getting paid and staying independent

Setting up in-app purchases is a lot more involved and more resource-intensive, especially for the “indies” that don’t have a ton of resources, Ryu explained to me over coffee in San Francisco last week:

“A lot more money is being made in the top-grossing apps, but customer behavior has fundamentally changed and they are going to free-to-play. That’s sad to me — the paid app market was super friendly to these indies. Not only was it super inexpensive to implement that monetization model … to implement free-to-play you have to analytics, and it really encroaches on the design of your app. It doesn’t even work on many kinds of apps.”

A preview of Hatch on an iPhone

Ryu is no whiner. He thinks a lot about app sales dynamics — he’s been making software since he was 14 — and at 25, admits that he probably loves the App Store “more than 95 percent of the people that work at Apple.” But his dilemma is not unique: every smaller developer — including plenty who don’t have near the successful track record that Ryu and his Impending co-founder David Lanham do — are facing the pricing question. For now, he said, they’re leaning toward paid. But he keeps going back and forth.

The app Ryu is working on right now is a long-held vision of his that draws on the old NeoPets and Sim City concepts combined with our constantly present mobile devices. Hatch is due out later this summer — if you want a peek at what’s coming, check out the incredibly detailed teaser site set up for it.

If you see that page and even look back at the apps Ryu’s helped to bring to fruition — from early iOS gaming hit The Heist to Clear and more — it’s clear that these are high-quality apps. So how — and how much — should he and his partners be charging for years’ worth of work? Should they give it away for free and cross their fingers that some people will pay up?

How often should you ask users for money?

It obviously does work for a lot of developers, even smaller ones. FiftyThree, which gives its Paper iPad app away for free, charges for additional features like pens and tools — and is consistently one of the top-grossing iPad apps. CEO Georg Petschnigg finds paid apps are limiting, because once the price of an app is set, it’s harder to take features away in future versions because people have paid for them. That, he said, can lead to bloated software.

“In-app purchase is a tremendous opportunity to offer something (like how a) chef only puts what people want to eat on a menu, we see in-app purchase as a mechanism for paring down the feature set and offering up what people want to buy,” he told me. “It keeps the software footprint small and efficient. And from a design persepctive it’s incredibly liberating.”

On the business side, he points out it means they’re not limiting their value per customer either.

The decision on pricing comes down to the type of app a developer is looking for and the relationship they want with the customer.

“I think that if we’re going to be doing buinesss here we should probably be making money off of the long-term relationship with the pets, instead of charging up front,” Ryu said. “So free-to-play matches a pet and that kind of experience. But on the other hand, we’re also interested in creating that kind of long-term relationship, and Hatch is supposed to be a happy place you go to … is it better to ask for money once or ask twice?”

No obvious solution

This question comes up as there’s a bit of a movement afoot that smaller developers should just charge more — and forget nickel-and-dimeing their users via in-app payments. Right now $4.99 may stick out as an expensive mobile app. But in proper perspective of the software industry as a whole, $5 is nothing. It’s a coffee and a bagel in the morning. Minecraft on the iPhone is $6.99, but as a console game, on the Xbox it’s more than twice that.

Productivity suite Readdle works in a similar field as Paper, but it went the other way: charging more. Readdle, which now has 40 employees worldwide, charges as much as $7 for its apps, and they too are often listed among the highest-grossing iOS apps. And like others in the App Store, they’re seeing those numbers — download and revenue — slipping, even with promotion from Apple. Just moving to in-app purchase isn’t necessarily the obvious solution. CEO Igor Zhadanov said he wasn’t sure his users would like being prompted to unlock a certain calendaring feature while trying to get work done.

So Readdle is looking to move some of its business beyond the iOS App Store: by building up its software into an enterprise product because “we don’t want to have to rely on the App Store.”

For Hatch, as of last week at least, Ryu is thinking of charging up front. “But, then again, balanced against this past week of wondering where the paid market will be going, maybe we’ll start paid and move downward in price.”

“It’s a new world that we have to figure out or else we’re going to be stuck in the old dying world. I saw that happen with Mac developers: when the App Store opened up on the iPhone, they had a big head start, but out of matters of principles and politics, didn’t (take it). I saw so many Mac developers not make that transition,” said Ryu. “We have to make that next jump. I hope we’re not those people.”

Thumbnail image credit: Kelly Bumford via Compfight cc

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to Ride the Freemium App Wave to Success
• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space

With an update to phones running iOS 6 and iOS 7, Siri now reacts with a strong, two-fold approach when mentions of suicide come up. First, the assistant offers the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and will even offer to call directly — a new feature that makes seeking help as simple as clicking “yes” on the phone. If for whatever reason the user decides to select “no”, Siri does a search of all local suicide prevention centers, offering a list and directions powered by Yelp.

It’s clear from the update that Apple wants to prevent any potential response blunder and turn Siri into a usable tool for those in crisis to get the professional aid they need. But it’s also not the first company to target specific language towards suicidal users. Google has kept a list of “trigger search” keywords to indicate a user searching for suicide since 2010, and will also send back a suggestion to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Like Google, Apple is hoping that its approach will prevent users from seeking desperate methods through its services — and will get a little help instead. And it’s needed in the wake of unsettling news last month, when the New York Times reported that more Americans are dying from suicide than car accidents.

Apple’s update may be a small step, but it is one that shows that the tech community is thinking about how its products are utilized by those in need. Siri’s response to that single question or statement could have a big impact, and now the little robotic assistant can better assist people in their darkest hours.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Here are the main conclusions from the best reviews out there:

• The Verge spent time with the 13-inch Air and puts it this way: “13 hours and 29 minutes. That’s all you really need to know — that’s how long the new MacBook Air running Safari lasted running The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and images at 65 percent brightness.”
• Fortune tried out the 11-inch version and was quite happy though has one quibble: ”A week with the new 11-inch MacBook Air has convinced me that Apple’s hardware upgrade—minor as it may seem—will still be enough to convince some to upgrade or buy one for the first time based on excellent battery life alone. It doesn’t achieve 9 hours in-between charges with everyday use, but 8.5 hours of Web browsing is pretty close. And while I wish Apple would offer a build-to-order option for a higher-resolution screen—the current 1,366 x 768 resolution is really starting to feel cramped—it’s a small omission on an otherwise excellent device.”
• CNET is effusive about the battery (but strangely knocks it for not having a touchscreen): “It’s easy to say that this new version of the 13-inch MacBook Air is a modest step forward, with no physical changes to the exterior, and still no higher-res display, touch screen, or HDMI port. The battery life is a very big deal, however, and when you couple that with a $100 price cut on the base model, down to $1,099, the 13-inch MacBook Air is, despite not being the newest design on the block, still one of the most universally useful laptops you can buy.”
• PC Magazine got the 13-inch to last 15.5 hours, but also noted this: “The downside of the lower-clocked processor is that the MacBook Air is a bit slower on the multimedia benchmark tests (Handbrake and Photoshop CS6), where it lags the Windows systems with faster-clocked Core i5 processors. On the flipside, the MacBook Air is still two to four times faster than Intel Atom-powered Windows 8 slate tablets on the Handbrake test, and those Atom-powered tablets can’t run the Photoshop CS6 test at all.”

For our take on the announcements made at WWDC 2013, be sure to listen to the special edition of The GigaOM Show podcast:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The future of notebooks: Following in the footsteps of the MacBook Air
• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution