Today Apple announced their new iPod lineup full of upgrades and the usual array of bright bubblegum colors. The iPod Touch is revised with the same anodized aluminum that is used in the MacBook. The colors come in black, silver, turquoise, neon green and pink. This is the lightest iPod Touch to date, and comes with a detachable wrist loop as an easy way to keep your iPod Touch close, without having to actually carry it.

Mac users have found themselves on the receiving end of a special sort of profiling: class profiling. By tracking what browser an Orbitz user used to visit the Orbitz site, Orbitz was able to determine the spending habits of those who were using Macs, and compare them to the spending habits of those who use a Windows PC machine. And what Orbitz found was that, on average, Mac users spend as much as $30.00 a night more on hotels. So, Orbitz has started serving up different options for those visiting Orbitz on a Mac than they do for those using the site from a PC.

Up until now Mac owners have been relatively safe (and smug) when it came to the infectability of their computers. Worms, trojans, viruses, and other malware were considered to be primarily the domain of Windows. That may have changed last week, however, when the Russian security company, Dr. Web, reported that as many as a half a million Macs are already infected with what is being called the “Flashback Trojan”. Here’s how to know if you have Flashback Trojan, and how to get rid of Flashback Trojan.

Have you ever been reading a PDF file, or a website, on your Mac, and been frustrated at the lack of a “Page down” or “Page up” key? In fact, it’s very easy to page up or page down on a Mac, but it’s not obvious how to do it. Here is how to page down on a Mac (or page up on a Mac).

The “Security Alert” trojan, sometimes known as a ‘rogue antivirus’ attack, is making the rounds again. First spotted a few years ago, until recently the “web security” antivirus alert trojan targeted mainly PCs, tricking Windows users into downloading the evil ‘BestAntivirus2011.exe’ file by telling them that “To help protect your computer Windows web security have detected trojans and ready to remove them.” (Note the poor language usage.) Now this same tactic is being used to attack Mac users – all that has changed is the “Windows” to “Apple” and the file name (‘MacProtector.mpkg for Macs’) – even the poor language remains the same! “To help protect your computer Apple web security have detected trojans and ready to remove them.” says the pop-up. Don’t fall for it, and whatever you do, don’t click on “Remove all”, which will cause the malware to be downloaded to your computer.

More and more audio files are showing up on the Internet in WMD format, which means that you need to convert those WMD files to listen to them on your Mac or MP3 player. This is particularly true for audio books, which frequently are downloaded as a WMD file. WMD is a format used by Microsoft’s media software, and unless you want to install the Microsoft software on your Mac in order to play your WMD file on a Mac, you are going to have to convert that WMD file in order to listen to it on your Mac. Fortunately, it’s actually really easy to convert a WMD file to listen it on a Mac, and to create MP3s of the file so that you can listen on your iPod, iPad, or other MP3 player.

Here at TIP we are a broadly Mac shop, and we do love our Apple computers. But that doesn’t mean that they never fail, and recently we learned the hard way that there are some known issues with certain repairs – Mac gotchas, if you will – that will get you every time. Such is the case with having your logic board replaced, which will cause problems for you with Time Machine and iTunes, because it changes your computer’s MAC address, on which Time Machine and iTunes rely to authenticate your computer. The biggest issue we see is that Apple knows about this, and doesn’t warn the customer before swapping out the logic board. A simple warning from Apple before replacing a logic board could save Apple customers hours – days even – of stress, heartache, and futile searching and effort; but Apple doesn’t give their customers that warning. So, we are giving you that warning – here’s our word to the wise.

In a move sure to have Microsoft’s legal eagles tearing their hair out, Microsoft Partner Group Manager Simon Aldous, during an interview with Britain’s Intent Media’s PCR publication, acknowledged that Microsoft has been aiming to “create a Mac look and feel.”

A neurological study of what triggers people to buy, using FMRI (Functional MRI), has found that people who are devout Apple fans manifest exactly the same neurological responses to exposure to their “god” as do devout Christians.