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Apple’s new spaceship headquarters is poised to be one of the most futuristic corporate buildings in California once it touches down, but to help the campus stay connected to its roots, the company is painstakingly preserving a 100-year-old barn built by pioneers who settled the area.

Visitors at Apple Campus 2 will notice the bright red barn sitting next to the new fitness center as part of Apple’s effort to transform the land surrounding the campus from 80 percent asphalt and concrete, to 80 percent greenery and open space.

HP just announced its newest business laptops today – the HP EliteBook Folio 1020 – and even though the company is touting them as the thinnest and lightest ‘business-class’ notebooks ever made, they certainly look a hell of lot like the MacBook Air.

This isn’t the first time HP’s design team ripped off Apple’s work, but the copycats have fine-tuned the design of their previous MacBook Air rip-off, the 1040, by removing the unsightly ventilation fan on the side, so it looks even more Apple-esque.

Here’s another look:

Apple’s mega deal with IBM could give it a death grip on the enterprise market, but according to a report from The Information, Google’s Android team has been deep in talks with HP on ways it can push Android deeper into enterprise itself.

Using Google Now’s voice-search powers, the Android unit and HP have been discussing the potential of creating a mobile search product nicknamed “Enterprise Siri,” that could access financial data, product inventory, and more to become the perfect Siri-like tool for enterprise customers.

Reports of Apple’s pending Beats Electronics acquisition has left the vast majority of us scratching our heads, but if you thought this was just another spurious claim from anonymous supply chain blabbermouths, you can think again. Not only did the story come from reputable sources, but it has been all but confirmed by Dr. Dre himself.

In the short video below, a drunk Dre proclaims himself “the first billionaire in hip-hop” as he celebrates with friends.

Slowly but surely, the worldwide PC market is drying up. In the first quarter, a recent report from IDC says that worldwide PC shipments have slipped 4.4% year-over years. And not even Apple has proven immune to the wasting away of the PC market, but they’re still making up for it on other ways.

Acer CEO JT Wang has announced his decision to resign from the consumer electronics company following poor financial results and struggling PC sales. Wang will step down from the CEO position on January 1, but will remain chairman until the second quarter of 2014.

Acer president Jim Wong will become its new CEO.

Things haven’t been going all that well for HP on the PC shipment front, but it’s hoping to make up for that with its new high-tech Project Moonshot servers. In fact, HP CEO Meg Whitman is so jazzed about her company’s new servers that she’s even going around bragging that Apple might be considering HP for its iTunes services.

HP famously gave up on its smartphone and tablet business back in 2011 when it announced that it would no longer be developing hardware powered by its webOS platform. But two years later, the company is planning to have another crack at it.

Yam Su Yin, HP’s Senior Director of Consumer PCs and Tablets, has confirmed that the company is already working on a new smartphone — one that will deliver a unique experience that you won’t get from its rivals.

PC makers have been copying the Mac for years, but every now and then you just have to shake your head yet again. HP has unveiled two laptops that blatantly rip off Apple’s designs. It’s so painfully obvious that it makes you wonder if HP wants customers to be fooled into thinking they’re buying from Apple.

Foxconn has been forced to make preparations for life after Apple following reduced demand for the iPhone and other iOS devices which has caused the company’s revenue to nosedive, The New York Times reports.

The manufacturer has been doing well off the back of Apple’s hugely successful devices in recent years, which have been contributing at least 40% of its revenue, according to analyst estimates. But after suffering a 19.2% drop in revenue during the first quarter of the year, thanks to declining iPhone and iPad orders, Foxconn is now looking at ways in which it can be less reliant on Apple.

Apple’s U.S. Mac sales changed around 7.5% during the first quarter of 2013, according to research firms IDC and Gartner, but neither agree on whether they were up or down. While IDC reports that shipments were down 7.5% during January to April, Gartner sales that sales were up 7.4%. So who’s right?

PC shipments plummeted 13.9 percent during the first quarter of 2013 as compared to the same period of time last year, even more than the expected decline of around 7.7 percent. The International Data Corporation released its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker data today, and reports that these numbers are the worst quarter ever, since the IDC began tracking the PC market in 1994. This also makes it the fourth quarter in a row of year-over-year declines in PC shipments.

One of the most common complaints that we hear about iOS is that it’s getting boring. We’ve been using practically the same interface for over 5 years and haven’t seen any major changes, so people are hoping for something new and exciting with iOS 7.

Jesse Head’s iOS 7 App Switcher concept comes with the type of UI changes we’re hoping to see. The simple concept makes switching between apps more effective. You wouldn’t have to deal with thumbing through a row of little app icons, but instead would see a bunch of app tiles with live previews. You can swipe to quit, search for apps, and control your music or brightness in a flash.

Here’s a video of the concept in action:

Apple and HP have been rated best for customer experience in a study of 10,000 consumers in the United States carried out by Temkin Group. Apple took the top spot in the computer sector with a rating of 64%, while HP took second place with a rating of 62%.

At the other end of the spectrum sat Sony and Lenovo, which were the lowest-rated computer makers.

After facing a lot of scrutiny for the past few years over working conditions at factories in China, Apple has made a lot of progress on cleaning up their manufacturing partners’ facilities. Pay has been increased. Forced overtime and child labor aren’t as frequent. And we haven’t heard of any massive brawls in a while.

Following Apple’s lead, HP has decided to get its act together in China as well by reducing the number of underage student laborers at its facilities in China.

Samsung has surpassed Apple as the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductors, according to Gartner. The Korean company’s hugely popular smartphones, such as the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, led to a 29% surge in chip purchases in 2012, taking its semiconductor spending past that of any other company.

In the Post-PC era, we’ve seen PC sales steadily decline while consumers embrace tablets. Dell and Acer have suffered huge losses while the PC market contracts, but Apple’s Mac business is actually growing year over year.

Research firm Gartner released their personal computer shipment data for the fourth quarter of 2012 today, and found that while some manufacturers are in decline, a select few have been able to increase their marketshare.

You wouldn’t normally associate HP devices with the Android or iOS platforms, but the company’s latest gadget plays nicely with them both. It’s called the Pocket Playlist, and it allows you to stream all of your media wirelessly to all your smartphones and tablets. It boasts 32GB of internal storage, and it can stream to up to five devices simultaneously.

Research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed that “smart connected device” shipments — which includes computers, smartphones, and tablets — reached a record high during the third quarter of 2012, largely thanks to Apple and Samsung. The pair’s hugely popular devices helped the market grow 27.1% year-on-year as it reached a record 303.6 million shipments valued at over $140 billion.

When you just look at the money Apple made in 2012 it’s pretty incredible. But when you provide some context to those earnings and put Apple’s profits next to the competition’s profits, Apple’s performance is absolutely mindboggling.

From October 2011 to September 2012 Apple made more money than Microsoft, Ebay, Google, Yahoo! Facebook and Amazon combined. In that same period, Dell, Asus, Intel, Acer, IBM, Lenovo, and HP (basically the entire PC industry) only made $19.3 billion in profit, which is less than half of Apple’s profit.

Source: Statista

Scott Trattner, the executive creative director behind the “Genius” advertising campaign — which was quickly killed by Apple shortly after its debut — has left his role at TBWA/Media Arts Lab in favor of a new role with advertising agency 72andSunny.

The Enough Project released a report today that ranks the top technology companies on how well each one is doing in wiping out the use of “conflict minerals” like tantalum, tin, and tungsten in their products. Apple, HP, Intel, Motorola are at the top of the list, while Nintendo is at the bottom, along with HTC, Sharp, Nikon, and Canon.

The minerals in question, mined in areas of armed conflict and human rights abuses, are used in many technology products around the globe, and The Enough Project – a non-profit arm of the Center for American Progress – tracks these in its effort to combat crimes against humanity.

Microsoft has positioned its Windows RT tablet OS as an iPad competitor, particularly in business and enterprise markets. Windows RT devices, which includes the ARM-based version of Microsoft’s Surface, are designed to be less expensive than Intel-powered Windows 8 tablets and are meant to push the new touch-oriented Metro interface.

Microsoft has even gone so far as to introduce special licensing terms for businesses that will offer free access to a virtual desktop from Windows RT devices while other platforms, including the iPad, will need to buy a new type of license for such access.

Windows RT would seem a perfect choice for businesses that want to support mobile employees with a tablet, except that Windows RT seems keep hitting one wall after another – the latest being that two of Microsoft’s longstanding OEM partners have decided to pass on creating Windows RT tablets.

There are a long list of advantages that come with owning a Mac, but premium machines come with premium price tags. As such, we’re always on the lookout for fantastic deals on Apple’s latest releases, and we’ve found a terrific one on Craigslist. For just $200, you can pick up a late-2011 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM.

There’s only one caveat: You’ll have to work around six massive bullet wounds.

Intel may be the biggest world’s biggest chip maker, but the company failed to cash in on the mobile technology craze. Staying focused on desktops and laptops where it had a near lock on general computing market, Intel missed out taking the lead in smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

Now trying to play catchup, Intel has introduced its own ARM-competing tablets. The company is so confident (or arrogant) that it thinks it can make chips so compelling that Apple “can’t ignore” them for future iterations of the iPhone and iPad.