• Apple revealed during a courtroom session in its Samsung trial today that it’s licensed some of its iOS design patents to Microsoft, but with the agreement that Microsoft not try to use them to clone any Apple devices, Reuters reports.
• Technology Review looks at how far iPhone security has come since 2007. With app sandboxing and device encryption today, it is so secure that it’s mostly impossible for law enforcement to search iPhones for forensic evidence.
• Like clockwork, BGR gets wind of AT&T wireless memo banning employee vacation from the third or fourth week of September through mid-October.
• Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has been predicting the arrival of an Apple television for years, yet no such device has materialized. Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com wonders why people still take Munster’s predictions seriously.
• Apple’s already killed the optical drive in the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Computerworld looks at the evidence that Apple may be killing the optical drive in more Macs pretty soon.

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We know tablets are a serious threat to the PC’s dominance, but even the people who watch and forecast this industry didn’t entirely see this much damage coming this fast: IDC had predicted 2.1 percent growth for global PC sales for the second quarter and a drop of 6 percent here at home. For worldwide sales, there were two bright spots: both Lenovo and Asus bucked the downward-spiraling sales trend for the quarter. Lenovo saw sales rise more than 25 percent worldwide, and Asus almost 40 percent. And HP better watch out: Long the largest PC maker in the world, its market share for Q2 came in at 15.5 percent, while Lenovo is sneaking up behind at 14.9 percent.

Apple has been able to show significant growth in its Mac sales extending back several quarters, so it seems out of character for its U.S. sales to be off 1.1 percent from a year ago. (IDC didn’t report Apple’s worldwide sales numbers for the quarter, though we’ll find out on July 24 when the company reports its earnings.) Despite the drop-off, its market share in the U.S. did inch up a bit from 10.3 percent last quarter to 11.4 percent this quarter.

So what was it that went wrong for laptop and desktop makers last quarter? There’s a lot of waiting going on.

People are delaying purchases of laptops because an iPad or Android tablet is a cheaper upgrade and current owners tend to find they’re usually good enough for their most basic computing tasks. This has been hurting PC makers, and the pain will continue if the iPad, which has racked up 67.1 million unit sales in the last two years, really does see legitimate tablet competition in the form of the Microsoft Surface and the Google Nexus 7 this year. Apple has been up front about the fact that the iPad has been hurting Mac sales as well.

Businesses and individual consumers have been waiting for Windows 8 to drop later this fall and many for new MacBooks from Apple as well, which didn’t materialize until late last month. Some Macs, like the Pro and the iMac are still awaiting proper updates too.

Another thing PC manufacturers are still waiting for? The ultrabook play to actually result in significant sales. According to IDC, “Ultrabooks have not yet produced a significant rise in volumes - in part due to anticipation of improvements such as Windows 8 expected later this year, but also due to pricing.”

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Cook, with a little help from friends like SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, will likely preview updated operating systems, for both Mac and iOS devices (as pictures of banners decorating the venue revealed), reveal more about improvements to both, including Facebook integration, new maps for iOS, and possible tweaks to iCloud and Siri. In addition, it’s expected Apple will show off several new models of Macs, and give us the state of the Apple ecosystem, particularly vis a vis competitors like Google’s Android.

Though some potential news has leaked out, this being Apple, there’s sure to be some sort of surprise thrown in. We’ll be kicking things off here a little before 10 a.m., so please join us then to follow along with our live updates.

9:45 a.m.: Hey everyone, we’re here inside Moscone West and seated. Music is blasting, and a couple hundred people are still milling about. Things should be starting in a little over 10 minutes.

10:01 a.m. Lights go down, and a video with Siri welcoming us to the show begins. She welcomes us to “San Fran” (which, ugh) the “ATM of Silicon Valley.”

10:05: a.m. She then goes with a joke at Samsung’s expense: “Looking forward to the new Samsung. Not the phone, the refrigerator.”

Next Tim Cook takes the stage to loud, extended cheers from the developers in the crowd. He says “he has some really cool stuff for us” at the 23rd WWDC, which, he notes is older than some of the attendees.

He’s reflecting on the truly worldwide nature of the developers here, who are representing 60 countries.

10:06: Here comes the App Store ecosystem update. App Store update: More than 400 million App Store accounts, says Cook. This is the store with the largest number of accounts with credit cards anywhere on the Internet. And there are more than 650,000 apps people can buy. 225,000 are for iPad.

Here are new numbers: there have been 30 billion downloads from the App Store as of today. And developers have made more than $5 billion from selling apps.

32 more countries are getting the app store, too, which will bring the total to 155 countries.

10:09 a.m. Cook is getting a little emotional about the “heartwarming stories” about how apps have improved people’s lives. Then he shows us a video showing a blind person using a GPS app on the iPhone to walk through a forest.

10:14 a.m. Well, OK, that was pretty heartwarming. Also in the video: Children learning anatomy via an iPad app, the story of Airbnb and how people meet strangers from all over the world through the iOS app, a young girl using an iPad app for speech therapy.

10:17: “A reminder why all of us do what we do,” Cook says when the video ends. He thanks the developers for the apps “you’ve done for us.”

Now he’s talking about the new stuff: new notebooks, iOS 6 and Mountain Lion. Phil Schiller, SVP of Marketing takes the stage to talk notebooks.” (No iMacs or Mac Pro?)

10:20 a.m. Schiller starts with the MacBook Air. “Everyone is trying to copy it. But they find it’s not so easy,” he says. New Airs will get Ivy Bridge processors, up to 8GB of faster memory and 60 percent faster integrated graphics. Can add up to 512GB of flash storage now.

There will be USB 3.0 on these guys, will keep USB 2.0 support though. Will get same FaceTime 720p camera as MacBook Pro. They ship today.

10:25 a.m. MacBook Pro gets Ivy Bridge processors and much of the same feature updates too. These will still be 13 will start at $1199 and the 15 inch at $1799.

There’s also a new laptop, a next-generation MacBook Pro, it’s super skinny, both the bottom and the lid. Schiller puts his finger next to it, and shows it’s thinner than his index finger.

10:31 a.m. It’s 0.7 inches thin, to be exact. Pretty much indistinguishable in thinness from the Air. And yes, it has a Retina display that’s 15.4 inches across. Which means the pixels are too tiny for your eye to see individual pixels. The resolution will be 2880 x 1800.

Apple’s apps will be updated to accommodate all these new pixels, including Mail, Safari, iPhoto, FinalCut Pro. Other apps will be pixel doubled, but developers are going to need to improve their apps for the new displays, just like the iPad and iPhone before it. Adobe is going to be one of the first with a Retina-optimized Photoshop. Autodesk is also doing a new AutoCAD, Diablo III is also getting a high-res update.

10:32 a.m. Will have up to 16GB of memory. Will have flash storage “for the future, that’s the proper thing to build it around,” says Schiller. Can build it with up to 768GB. The battery life will be up to 7 hours, has an SD card, an HDMI port, USB 3/2 and a much thinner power adapter, and Thunderbolt.

10:43 a.m.: After one of the standard Apple marketing videos exulting the “elegance” and “innovations” of the new MacBook Pro, we’re back and Schiller is talking price. With Retina display and 8GB RAM, 256GB of storage, it’s certainly more expensive, and it starts at $2199.

10:45: a.m. It starts shipping today, which draws excitement from the crowd. The name is “the next-generation MacBook Pro with Retina Display,” which is kind of a mouthful.

10:47 a.m. OK, on to the software that runs on those new machines. Craig Federighi is out from the Mac team to tell us about it. There are 66 million Mac users now, “triple” from five years ago, and 40 percent of Mac users using Lion after 9 months. And we’re already jumping ahead to Mountain Lion.

10:51 a.m.First feature he talks about in Mountain Lion is iCloud, and goes over Documents in the cloud, how developers can use it with their own Mac Apps. Then he demonstrates Mountain Lion, showing us Reminders — which includes location based reminders for the Mac now too — updated Notes, and Messages. Messages is “the really huge one” according to Federighi. He gets a laugh from the crowd when he refers to “other legacy chat apps.”

Craig Federighi talks Mountain Lion.

10:58 a.m. Much of this is a review of the developer version of Mountain Lion we saw back in February. But I don’t remember this one: Dictation on the Mac works in everything, including Microsoft Word.

Also new: iCloud tab in Safari lets you pick up browsing across devices, and Safari is getting new gestures: you can zoom way out and get a view of all tabs you have open and you can scroll sideways to browse them.

11:03 a.m. He demonstrates how Twitter integration works: can tweet from Mac apps, can dictate tweets, and you get Twitter notifications in Notification Center.

Then he goes to “Power Nap.” It keeps your Mac up to date when it’s in sleep mode. You still get email Photostream, calendar appointments and notifications. It will backup while asleep and you’ll also get automatic app and system software updates, all without turning on the machine’s fan.

Airplay Mirroring also comes to the Mac: you can mirror to Apple TV for presentations, watching TV, or listening to music. Another thing from iOS is coming to the Mac too, GameCenter, with all the same friends and games you have on iOS GameCenter.

11:07 a.m. New local features for China, as previously announced: new fonts, sharing support for Sina Weibo, search in Baidu and new Chinese email services. “Get your apps ready for China,” says Federighi.

11:09 a.m.Mountain Lion comes out next month — but no specific date — via the same method as Lion, the Mac App Store. But the price is brand new: $19,99 for Lion upgrades, all the way back from Snow Leopard. One upgrade will update all your Macs. Developers here will get a “near-final” version of the OS. That’s it for Mountain Lion. Now, we’re onto iOS, and Scott Forstall is up.

11:12 a.m. Forstall reviews iOS 5: 84 of the top 100 apps use iOS notifications, which has meant they’ve sent 1.5 trillion notifications total. iMessage sends more than 1 billion messages every day. Twitter integration has mean a 3x increase of iOS Twitter users. Almost 50 percent of photos shared on Twitter come from iOS 5, he says.

11:17 a.m. Alright, now he’s ready to talk iOS 6. First things first: Siri. Some big updates: you can ask for sports scores, individual players’ stats, team standings, or even attributes of individual players (he asks Siri if LeBron or Kobe is taller…and she knows the right answer.” She also knows game times.

There will be more useful restaurant info too via the Yelp partnership announced in October and you can also make OpenTable reservations through Siri. You can ask for movie times — info via Rotten Tomatoes — and you can watch trailers right inside Siri.

11:18 a.m. It also works better in apps: you can tell Siri which iOS game you want to play and she’ll bring it up.

11:21 a.m. Another new thing is “eyes free” which will integrate with cars to bring Siri up via a button in your car. He doesn’t say which car manufacturers, but he says they’re working with them and some are “committed to delivering eyes free Siri within the next 12 months.”

11:23 a.m. Siri will get eight new languages including local Chinese options for China, Spanish in Mexico, Spain, the U.S. and Korean.

And now Facebook is up: it will be integrated right into iOS 6. You can post to FB from Photos, Safari, Maps, from the App Store, iTunes, GameCenter and Notifications — you can do FB updates (and tweets) from the notifications menu. There will be a public API so other apps can integrate with FB too.

You can Like apps, movies, music, TV shows, etc. And if you see a phone number or address in FB they will appear in your contacts in iOS. Birthdays and events will also be integrated.
f

11:27 a.m. The phone app is also getting some polishing. When someone calls and you can’t or don’t want to answer, you can reply with a message or you can set a reminder to return a call.

A long wished for feature is also arriving: do not disturb mode. You can tell your phone when not to ring or vibrate — say, if you’re sleeping, in a meeting or on a date. But, you can also allow through certain ones: you can set up a group that’s allowed to get through this do not disturb mode. There’s also an emergency mode you can set: if someone calls you twice within 3 minutes, the second one will come through.

11:30 a.m. FaceTime isn’t getting left out. It is now going to be available over a cell connection. And Apple ID and your phone number will be integrated so FaceTime calls or messages can start on an IPad, for example, and you can answer on your Mac.

11:33 a.m. Safari will get smart app banners: if someone goes to a developers website, a banner will pop up directing them to their app in the App Store.

In iOS 6 there will be shared Photostreams, which means you can share photos from your Photostream via a push notification to your friends you’ve selected. Then those photos will show up as an album that chosen people can view and comment on.

11:35 a.m. You can add photos and videos to email within the compose window, and you can pull to refresh messages.

And here’s a new app from Apple: a place to keep your mobile boarding passes, mobile movie tickets, Starbucks rewards cards, etc. It’s called PassBook. And this is pretty sweet: it integrates to your lock screen: when you get to the movie theater you have a ticket for, the phone will pop up your movie pass you’ve bought.

11:38 a.m. This is super cool: if your gate changes for your flight, Forstall says the ticket in your PassBook will update in realtime.

Forstall says Apple is going to improve accessibility. Guided Access lets you trace a circle over a button you don’t want someone to hit and you can lock an app so the home button is disabled — he says this is targeted for children with autism who use the iPad for learning.

But the single-app mode also works for anyone: teachers can lock iPads to a single app or museums can for tour guide apps.

11:42 a.m.And now, the worst kept secret of iOS 6: new maps: “We’re doing all the cartography ourselves,” says Forstall. There are 150 million business listings from all over, it’s integrated with Yelp, and has its own traffic service, to see slow traffic and incidents on the road. The data for that will be anonymous from iOS users in realtime. And yes, it’ll have turn-by-turn navigation — something Apple’s wanted for a while but that Google wouldn’t allow with its Maps app for iOS. Turn by turn works from the lock screen of the phone and it’s integrated with Siri.

11:44 a.m. Next Forstall demonstrates Flyover, which is built with 3D images from flying over cities. You can choose camera angles and get pretty awesome 3D renderings of locations. Other details: For standard maps you can also zoom in really fast, rotate map labels, and get reviews, ratings and 3D images when you click on a label on the map.

11:49 a.m. That’s it for maps. Forstall says there are 200 other features, but he’s not going to go over all of them. He mentions that the App Store is getting an update, but he doesn’t go into detail. Also mentions briefly iPhone compatible hearing aids they’re working on.

And the same localized features for China for the Mac are all coming to iOS as well.

Transit apps: the best ones are third-party, he says. Apple will feature and promote transit apps right in their new Maps app in iOS 6.

Developers will get a beta of the new OS today, he says. Though it will ship “this fall.” Will support iPhone 3GS and later and 4th generation iPod touch.

11:55 a.m. “Only Apple could make” these hardware and software services, says Tim Cook, who takes over from Forstall. This is why people work with Apple, he says.

“The products we make and the apps you create can fundamentally change the world,” he tells developers. “I can’t think of a better reason of getting up in the morning.”

And on that slightly emotional note, we’re done! . We’ll continue to bring you analysis of what we saw here today throughout the day here on GigaOM. Thanks everyone for joining us for WWDC coverage!

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• It seems clear that Apple is about to refresh its Mac lineup, which was last updated in July 2011. The latest rumor, from an analyst who spoke with AppleInsider, is that not only will the 17-inch MacBook Pro be dropped, but that Apple will resurrect the MacBook name — after killing it off last summer — for a pair of 13-inch and 15-inch laptops, with the latest Intel chipset, a Retina Display, and the choice of a solid-state or traditional hard drive. But like the MacBook Air, it will supposedly ditch the optical drive. The two new MacBooks, reportedly, will exist alongside two refreshed MacBook Airs and two new MacBook Pros.
• Plenty of whispers have indicated Retina Displays are coming to Macs. More evidence showed up in the form of an app in the Mac App Store newly labeled with “retina graphics,” as spotted by The Next Web. (Be sure to see Kevin Tofel’s thoughts on how much such an upgrade would cost.)
• T-Mobile may be the only major carrier in the U.S. that can’t offer the iPhone, but it’s going to use WWDC to test its upgraded 4G network. On Thursday the carrier confirmed to 9to5Mac that it is doing a trial run with its 4G HSPA+ service in the 1900 MHz band around San Francisco’s Moscone Center, where, “coincidentally,” iPhone-toting WWDC attendees from all over the world will be swarming starting Monday morning.
• Bloomberg Businessweek has a great profile of one of the most familiar faces of the annual WWDC event besides Steve Jobs: Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller. The piece focuses on the pressure he’s under — as holder of the company’s nearly $1 billion annual ad budget – to keep the company and its products “cool” and relevant.
• The aftermath of every Apple event is clouded by unmet expectations on the part of Apple fans and critics alike. If you want to see what the people who trade Apple stock are expecting and how they view Apple stock’s potential, take a look at Fortune’s roundup.

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When NPD says that Apple leads mobile PC makers with 23.4 million units sold worldwide during 2011′s Q4 — with the largest share of the market at 26.6 percent — that certainly sounds impressive. Especially when you know that Apple does not typically crack the top 5 in global PC sales.

But it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for NPD to count them that way when the next statement in the report is this:

Nearly 80% of Apple’s mobile PC shipments were iPads, more than 18.7 million shipped in the quarter, up 156% Y/Y, and 48.4 million units for the year, up 183% Y/Y.

It’s the iPad that’s boosting that number. So why not just talk about iPads by themselves? NPD does get to that later on in the report, noting that Apple had a 59.1 percent share of the tablet market at Q4′s end, with 18.7 million iPads sold. (It’s worth noting that Apple reported 15.7 million iPads sold during that same period.)

So why give Apple’s PCs a boost? Make no mistake — Apple is doing pretty well selling actual PCs, considering where they’ve come from. Their most recent quarterly results showed 5.2 million sold during the last three months of 2011, the most Macs Apple has ever sold in a single quarter. (Note that that’s mostly MacBooks, which are true mobile PCs.) And the Mac is one of the only brands with real sales momentum — last month IDC called the last quarter of 2011 “the second-worst year in history” for the U.S. PC market, and Mac sales were the only bright spot, with 18 percent growth for the quarter.

NPD looks at tablets and laptops and says “they both have operating systems that support third-party apps and similar component packages,” so they should be counted the same. And they say their view is a little more forward-looking. The firm is thinking more about what happens when Windows 8 arrives on ARM chips.

“These artifical categories we created … they’re kind of decaying,” said NPD DisplaySearch senior analyst Richard Shim. “Windows 8 on ARM — what is that? Is that a PC or not a PC? We are looking a little bit forward.” While iPads right now make the case a little stronger that they’re different devices from PCs, he said, “as you look out further and see these two devices converging, you see that they’re kind of the same device.”

The iPad, though, is its own business for Apple, and one that is doing a pretty great job attracting customers by not being a PC. People are choosing them for a variety of reasons: they boot up faster, they travel easier in a bag or purse, you can get what you need done in apps with a few swipes or taps. When it’s time to get actual work done, sure, some people may pull out a wireless keyboard to attach to their iPad. But I would be willing to bet most of us wait until we get to a laptop (or desktop even) to write stories, reports, crunch numbers, edit photos or videos or design something, even if the components are similar.

Apple doesn’t think the iPad is a mobile PC either. CEO Tim Cook has been very open about the fact that he expects there to eventually be some cannibalization of Macs due to the iPad, though it may already be happening to Windows PCs. He does not, however, see the iPad completely erasing the PC industry. “I don’t subscribe to that” line of thinking, he told investors last week. And so far, he said, Mac sales being replaced by iPad sales has been minimal. The company’s sales results reflect that. If iPad sales and Mac sales are going up at the same time, that does say that the use case is just not the same.

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Apple sold a little over 2 million Macs between October and the end of December, according to IDC. That’s 18 percent more than the roughly 1,700 1.7 million Macs the company sold during the same quarter a year ago. It’s really good news for Apple, as that growth has put its market share at 10.92 percent of the U.S. PC market, its highest share in a very long time.

The rest of the field did not fare much better in the U.S. None of the rest of the top five of the largest PC makers saw any growth at all. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Toshiba and Acer all saw declines in the number of PCs shipped last quarter. (As I wrote on Monday, this is exactly the reason companies like Vizio think they can squirm their way as newcomers into the PC market.)

Things were so bad, IDC has dubbed 2011 the “the second-worst year in history” for the U.S. PC market. The overall 5 percent contraction of the market since 2010 is second only to the 12 percent decline after the Y2K buildup and the dot-com bust of 2001. The reasons this time around are related to lower demand for new computers, but also the HDD shortage.

The global view

Though it’s worked its way to No. 3 in the U.S. market, when taking a broader view, Apple still doesn’t register in the top 5 of the largest PC makers in the world. And the overall market did a bit better. HP, which is the perennial leader, declined 15 percent in global PC shipments to barely keep ahead of Lenovo, the only real bright spot. HP of course was dealing with the after effects of announcing and then reconsidering a decision to stop selling PCs in mid-2011.

Lenovo surged 37 percent during the quarter to ship a little over 13 million PCs, good for the No. 2 spot, but a record in global marketshare for the company. Dell saw a little bit of growth (7 percent) in shipments, though not as much as Asus’s 26 percent. Acer lost ground, but stayed as the No. 4 largest vendor. All of this added up to an overall .17 percent decline in the PC market for the quarter, says IDC. But this wasn’t a huge surprise, and the signs that this would be a tough quarter were there:

As expected, shortages of hard disk drives (HDDs) added to challenges from slow economic conditions and competition from other consumer electronics, including media tablets, eReaders and mobile phones. The 4Q11 results reflected a year-on-year decline of 0.2% for the quarter and growth of 1.6% for the full year.

Update: Gartner also released its global marketshare stats Wednesday, reaching roughly the same conclusions as IDC. Gartner saw a 1.4 percent decline for the quarter in worldwide PC shipments, but .5 percent growth for the full year. Gartner also cited “continuously low” demand for PCs as a reason for the disappointing final quarter of 2011, as well as economic uncertainty in Western Europe and North America. Gartner’s Mikako Kitagawa warned that though the HDD shortage had a “limited impact” on the fourth quarter’s PC shipments, we can expect the effects to linger throughout 2012.

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1. Take a picture of your products and serial numbers

Whether you want to inventory your items or need a handy reference when there’s a problem, taking a picture of the product as well as its serial number means you won’t be in the awkward position of trying to talk on the phone while on the floor with a flashlight trying to read those teeny tiny numbers.

Plus, if you should have a theft or disaster, having a visual record of your items makes it easier for your insurance company to settle your claim.

2. Schedule your items with insurance

Speaking of insurance, I suggest contacting your homeowners, renters, or business insurance provider to see about separate insurance for your most expensive technology items. While insurance providers and policies vary, typically scheduling an item provides it extra protection and covers it separate from your regular deductible. If your computer is scheduled, many times it will even cover data recovery should your computer be dropped or damaged.

3. Track key information in your Address Book and iCal

If only you’d contacted tech support before the warranty expired, the broken gadget would have been repaired at no charge! There’s an easy way to make sure you have all your info on hand when you need it.

As you take pictures of your items in step 1, put the serial number and warranty expiration date in your Address Book along with tech support’s phone number (create custom fields for Serial Number and Tech Support if you wish). Attach the picture of the item to the address book entry.

Then put the warranty expiration in your iCal Now you’ve got all the info you need in one place and won’t miss that warranty expiration date.

A bonus outcome of this tip is that if you are at the electronics store and you have questions about compatibility or which model you own, the information will be handy so long as you sync your address book info manually or through iCloud.

While these tips won’t prevent problems from occurring, they’ll help protect you from further cost and inconvenience when they do.

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While the idea of a sale at Apple, where sales are seldom seen, is tantalizing, if history is any indication, there’s no real reason to get too excited about Apple’s Black Friday plans. Last year, for instance, discounts were in the order of around 8 percent across its product lines. In other words, you’d save about $100 on items over $1,000, and much less on cheaper items like iPods. Not bad, but not great; generally people can get similar discounts using education or business purchasing discounts.

You can do better. There are lots of sites out there that will have deals that make sure your money goes further on Apple products on Friday. One recurring favorite is MacMall, which often offers discounts at least as steep as those offered by Apple itself, and often beats the official prices by at least a few dollars. Amazon  is another place to check for bigger reductions, especially since it offers access to many partner stores, as is MacConnection, which already has some decent sales running.

It’s even worth keeping an eye on Best Buy, which is apparently offering $150 off MacBook Pro and iMac devices this year, as well as $100 iTunes cards for only $80.

Don’t get me wrong. For Apple to loosen its tight grip on pricing enough to let you save even a few dollars on any of its products is reason enough to pick up that new MacBook you’ve been dreaming about, but make sure you can’t get a better deal elsewhere first; Apple isn’t running out of its own products anytime soon.

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Employees are not only asking IT departments for Macs at work, they’re bringing their own into the office. The Forrester report finds that 22 percent of enterprise businesses foresee the use of Macs owned by employees “increasing significantly.” But at the same time 41 percent of those same companies don’t allow those employees to access e-mail or the company network on those machines, either at the office or from home. As analyst David Johnson writes, that just encourages people to spend their own time figuring out how to bypass these rules:

That leaves a lot of employees to find their own ways to get around corporate prohibition. Companies Forrester spoke with for this document described a gray market emerging internally, where employees share tips and strategies to use their Macs at work and bypass corporate roadblocks.

Forrester says you may as well let Mac users have them out in the open and accessible to the network at work since their study shows that people who want to work on MacBooks, for instance, classify as a “power notebook user.” To them that means those employees are the ones that work longer and are more productive. Another reason for the change of heart: Forrester says Macs “have developed a reputation for reliability and low maintenance.” What IT person in charge of the budget doesn’t want to hear that?

But while the guys managing desktop and laptop deployment may still need to get with the program, the teams managing mobile IT have already seen the light on letting employees have input on their devices. Since the arrival of the iPhone and Android smartphones, this same phenomenon has been taking place. A group of mobile IT specialists talked about it at GigaOM Mobilize in San Francisco last month.

Julie Palen, SVP of Tangoe, says that a great percentage of employees are not asking their employers for a corporate phone. They don’t mind paying for a device or the plan as long as they can use a device of their choice and access the company network, she said.

“It’s irrelevant who owns the device or who pays for the plan,” said Palen. “It’s all about the device, as long as the data is secure and controlled … then that’s the big change and the answer becomes yes.”

Because the tools are there to secure those networks, companies are basically silly not to let tech-savvy employees use their own devices. And mobile IT guys finally figured it out this year, the Mobilize panel agreed:

“2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of effect Forrester’s exhortation has over the next year or so. Will IT managers take it to heart, or just continue business as usual? We can guess which option employees would want.

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Macs retain higher overall resale values than many other PCs, but they don’t last forever. But how do you know when to act? What are the symptoms of impeding Mac death or obsolescence, and when is a good time to consider replacing an old Mac with a new one?  The following seven points should help you make an educated decision about whether or not to invest in one of the new MacBook Pros unveiled Monday, or any other new Mac for that matter.

1. Will not run OS X Lion (or Snow Leopard). In the past, if you had a Mac running an older version of OS X, you could keep it running for a long time without much issue. But iCloud’s minimum specs have changed that. Your Mac must have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor to run Lion 10.7.2 which is required to use iCloud on a Mac. If you’re not certain your Mac meets these requirements, you can easily identify exactly what Mac you have and get the specs from there. Users hoping to update to iCloud from MobileMe will need a newer Mac, and those hoping to stay on top of what could become the core of Apple’s business will also want to upgrade.

Not everyone needs the convenience features of iCloud, but you should note that Apple has also stopped releasing security updates for older Macs as well.  To play it safe, you may need to have a Mac that can at least run Snow Leopard.

2. Battery no longer keeps its charge. While certainly not the primary reason to get rid of a MacBook that still works when plugged in, it’s a sign that you may be getting near the end of your machine’s useful life.  Apple does have a battery replacement program, even for MacBooks that do not user-accessible batteries, but the cost of replacing a battery can run anywhere from $130 to $180, and if your battery is past its prime, other system components might be nearing their end, too. It may be time to consider turning that laptop into a desktop, and get a new MacBook.

3. Most-used apps are sluggish. New software tends to get bigger and more demanding with time. With each new update comes a lot more features. These may not be features you need or care about, but sometimes they’re required in order to maintain compatibility with a particular file format. You can always try sliding back to an earlier version to preserver performance, but if apps you use time and time again are making your computer slow or unusable, it’s probably time to look for something new.

4. An iPad outperforms your Mac. It may surprise you to learn that the current iPad 2′s geek bench scores are about as high as the Mac mini G4′s scores from 2005. You could try to clean out your Mac, free up some hard drive space, or even add some memory or a solid state drive to help and improve performance. But at the end of the day, there is a limit to the gains in performance you can squeeze out of older hardware, and the cost of doing so might outweigh the benefit.

5. Difficult-to-replace component has failed. If you’re not comfortable replacing the internal components of you Mac yourself, service prices can become cost-prohibitive when compared to buying a new Mac.  You may also end up being very disappointed following a major upgrade when something else goes wrong, like a hard drive failure.  With MacBooks especially, when one part starts to fail, the rest are likely not too far from failing as well.

6. The Mac you want was just updated. Following the rumors about possible Apple product updates can become more obsession than hobby.  I have looked toward’s MacRumor’s Buyer’s Guide for years now in an effort to track down when a particular product is going to be updated.  The simplest rule to follow, however, is that if you need a new Mac, buy a new Mac. But if your need happens to coincide with a fresh product update, don’t hesitate.

7. You own a PC, but all your mobile devices are Apple. Like works best with like, and that’s particularly true of Apple products. Apple has a great guide to help with the transition from a PC to a Mac.  And with Apple’s Boot Camp, VMware Fusion or Parallels, you can keep on using Windows on a Mac if you like.

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