For the past decade, Apple has posted year-over-year revenue growth every quarter. The company announced its Q3 2013 earnings yesterday, posting revenue of $35.3 billion. While that beats the $35 billion posted in the same quarter a year ago -- it’s a tight 1 percent growth this time around.

Apple also reported a net profit of $6.9 billion, down from a net profit of $8.8 billion in the same quarter last year. However, average sale prices are lower now, at $581, compared with $608 a year ago.

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The Apple Developer site remains inaccessible after a security breach on Thursday. The company is quick to point out that personal information accessed in a database was encrypted, but goes on to say the possibility that personal data had been accessed could not be ruled out. Apple is taking the intrusion very seriously it seems.

The fact that the site is inaccessible is down to Apple rather than being the direct result of an attack. Apple states that as soon as it was aware of the breach, the site was purposely taken down. This initially saw the site replaced with a message informing visitors that the site was down for maintenance, but was later replaced with a message from Apple that goes into more detail.

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For relative newcomers to the Mac, the need to delve behind the scenes using an array of powerful tools and the command-line Terminal can be quite daunting. There are a number of useful tools such as TinkerTool that give power users easier access to a range of system features, but what about less experienced users?

It seems Bitdefender -- better known for its range of security products -- has come up with a solution, with its new free app for Lion and Mountain Lion users in the form of Mechanic by Bitdefender 1.1.

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According to YouGov's latest Tablet Tracker report there are more women owning tablets than men in the UK. The study says that in May, 52 percent of the country's touchscreen computers were in female hands, an increase of nine percent compared with the same time last year.

Over the same period, the share of tablets owned by men fell from 57 percent to 48 percent. There’s no equivalent report for female tablet ownership in the US, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it following a similar trend. Tablets are ideal for women.

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When Microsoft released Office for iPhone, the sentiment among users was mixed. Some customers complained that it could be signaling defeat for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8, while others praised it as a good business move -- it was a mixed bag of emotions. The biggest backlash was the Office 365 subscription requirement which left paying standard Office users (non-subscription) out in the cold. Today, Microsoft continues its trend of supporting the mobile operating system, as it releases Outlook Web App (OWA) for iOS.

Unlike Office for iPhone, Outlook Web App supports the iPad as well. Slate support is essential as many business users are trading their laptops for the Apple tablet to get work done. Unfortunately, the Office 365 subscription requirement also applies here. This is very frustrating, as many large businesses and enterprise users without 365 subscriptions would hugely benefit from this particular app. These customers will be forced to use Webmail in a browser or use a 3rd party app such as the much maligned Good for Enterprise.

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The magic is gone. As recently as mid-2012, rumors of a new iPhone was command performance -- bloggers and social networkers rushed every little bit of spec speculation to the web. A year later, has-beens are kings. Buzz belongs to the once high and mighty: HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Sony, each a former market-share commander. These companies are all something Apple, and even Samsung, is not: Hungry. Pride goes before the fall, they say. Pride brought down the big four (five, including BlackBerry), as their execs laughed off iPhone's launch in June 2007. They laugh again, as their companies bring truly innovative mobiles to market and Apple acts much as they did six years ago.

The fruit-logo company has a huge problem that is core to future competition. For nearly a decade, Apple benefitted from free-marketing, as enthusiast tech bloggers and reporters and over-eager Wall Street analysts and investors fanned the smallest flicker of rumor into raging fire. Now Android rises, like one of those robots in "Pacific Rim", to crush the iPhone monster. Meanwhile, Apple's humbled stock price gets less bang from rumors. CEO Tim Cook signaled three months ago that new "innovations" won't come until autumn -- and there are no leaks to rally the faithful against the horde of Android and Windows Phone infidels. The problem isn't bleeding market share -- a circumstance in most every market outside the United States -- but one of bleeding mindshare.

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It's no secret that the PC market has slowly taken a turn for the worse. And, if we're to believe what research company IDC said in late-May, it's not going to get any better anytime soon, with shipments predicted to drop even further, by 7.8 percent this year. Furthermore, tablets are expected to out-ship PCs by 2015. Unquestionably, the future appears gloomy but, according to Gartner, the culprit is not the controversial Windows 8, as some pundits believe.

Gartner just released its latest report on the state of the PC market, which shows that Q2 2013 shipments -- which top 76 million units from all vendors, combined -- have declined by 10.9 percent compared to the same period, last year (when shipments exceeded the 85.32 million mark). "The sharp decline in the second quarter of 2013 was partly due to the shift in usage patterns away from notebooks to tablets, and partly because the PC market was exposed to inventory reductions in the channel due to the start of the transition to new Haswell-based products", says Gartner principal research analyst Isabelle Durand.

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In the real world, when you have a birthday people give you gifts. But when these celebrations happen for software and services, the roles are frequently reversed. That is the case today as Apple celebrates the fifth birthday of its iTunes App Store by giving gifts to its customers.

Apple launched its iOS store on July 10, 2008 and the number of apps has grown exponentially since then -- from 500 apps at launch to 900,000-plus available today.

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Microsoft just released a new Windows tablet video ad, which pits Dell's XPS 10 against Apple's popular iPad. This time around the action takes place at a baseball field, with the software giant emphasizing the multitasking benefits available to the users of its tiled operating system.

The video ad shows two agents trying to sign a new baseball player, with one using the iPad and the other the XPS 10 to video chat with the boss and obtain relevant stats. Needless to say, the Apple slate user struggles to multitask, having to switch between apps to communicate and find the needed information, while his rival takes advantage of Windows RT's built-in snap feature to run two pieces of software at the same time.

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With an increasing focus towards beefier hardware -- faster processors, more RAM, larger and higher-resolution screens -- it's easy to lose sight of an important part in having an enjoyable smartphone experience -- battery life. The sheer performance has significantly increased over time due to a drastic technological advancement in chip making, but batteries are mostly the same now as they were a couple of years ago (only bigger).

It's no surprise then that smartphones quickly run out of puff after a mere couple of hours of intense use. So what if you want a top-of-the-line handset that is also an excellent battery life performer? Well, according to Which.co.uk, you should get a Samsung Galaxy S4 and look past the Apple iPhone 5 or Nokia Lumia 920.

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When I receive an email asking to validate my account info, it is an obvious alert that something is amiss. These frequently come in the guise of PayPal and even banks where I have no account -- a no brainer to hit the delete button. However, as I browsed through my messages while preparing for bed, one caught my attention, not because of variance from other email scams, but because it simply attempted to lure me to a trap I had not encountered previously.

While the likes of PayPal and CitiBank may trade between targets number one and two, this was the first time I had been asked to validate my Apple account -- the one I have never had.

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Big Brother is watching you. Or rather technology giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo are. The firms track their users relentlessly, and use that information to provide a tailored online experience (and maybe share it with government agencies).

Baynote, which provides personalized customer experience solutions for multi-channel retailers, has put together an interesting visual insight into what data the tech titans gather about you, how it’s collected, and what purposes it’s put to.

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On June 30, the day after my most recent one-year contract expires with AT&T U-verse, I will cancel the service and cut the cord. Last night, while I watched some last-minute Prime Time before it's gone, Apple commercial "Our Signature" aired. The ad is a concise, tweet-like mission statement that encapsulates all of what the company's product design is about. The spot sums up all anyone need know about the fruit-logo company in 60 seconds.

"This is what matters. The experience of a product. How it makes someone feel. Will it make life better", the commercial begins. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is what I have written about Apple for a decade -- that the company's products and marketing are aspirational. That the design goal simply is to make people feel good, to inspire life will be better for choosing the Apple way.

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History repeats itself, as another Apple product has connectivity issues -- three years ago it was the iPhone 4 and now the new MacBook Air is affected. Disgruntled users have taken to the company's support forum to report the Wi-Fi connectivity woes, which appear to persist even on replacement units.

According to a number of reports, both MacBook Air models -- the 11.6-inch and the 13.3-inch versions -- are affected, including those which feature factory upgrades. Users say that the Wi-Fi connection randomly drops after a period of activity, with the problem mostly being reported when relying on non-Apple-branded routers. Judging by the posted replies, none of the solutions presented thus far appear to fix this.

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Security specialist Kaspersky is warning of the increased vulnerability of Mac systems to malware. It points out that there are now more than 63 million OS X users in the world and that since 2010 the number of antivirus signatures for Macs has increased more than six times.

The top five threats include becoming part of a zombie network via a compromised WordPress site, fake antivirus products like MacDefender and MacGuard, exploitation of software vulnerabilities, targeted attacks and network infections.

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