As Phil Schiller takes the stage to talk about Lion, one thing’s for sure: OS X is doing better as a platform than it ever has.

As an install base, there’s now over 54 million users around the world. In fact, it’s doing better than ever. The last quarter, the PC market actually shrank 1 percent while the Mac went up 28%

The Mac has outgrown the industry every quarter for the past half decade.

Most of those sales are notebooks. 73% of all Mac sales are MacBooks.

Why are MacBooks so popular? It’s because OS X is the heart of Mac, and it’s ten years old today, and has evolved to become refined, powerful and beautiful.

Today, OS X evolves again into a Lion, with over 250 new features. But we’re only going to talk about a few of them.

“If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul,” says Steve Jobs. “This year, we’re here to talk about the soul across three separate products.”

Those three things? Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud.

“Let’s start with Lion,” says Jobs, making way for Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi to take the stage.

The lights have dimmed, the Aretha Franklin has been muted, and Steve Jobs has just taken the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to head up the 2011 World Wide Developer’s Conference.

We just got a screenshot of the notifications bar in iOS 5.

It could be fake of course, but it looks pretty good to us. And it fits with what former Engadget editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky is hearing.

Check it out full size:

Must be something huge! Pic by Greg Kumparak.

Here’s another shot. You can almost see underneath…

Here’s the line for this morning’s Stevenote. The video was taken at 6.15 AM; It’s as long a line I’ve see for any Apple event, including some of the massive store grand openings. The buzz for this WWDC is huge.

It appears the end of MobileMe is now upon us… or the end of paid subscriptions to MobileMe at least: a number of subscribers to the $99 a year service are reporting that Apple is automatically refunding renewal fees, but why?

As Apple unveils new services and products at this week’s WWDC, we start another week of deals for Mac fans. First up is a 20 percent discount on iTunes gift cards, allowing you to purchase a $15 card for just $12.75, for example. Next is CleanApp 3, giving you to ability to uninstall and archive your applications. Finally, there is a sampler of Tony Award-winning songs, including such favorites as Mama Mia!, Rock of Ages, and Million Dollar Quartet.

Like always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that leads us to interpret a random image as somehow being informationally significant. It’s why you see Jesus in the char on the face of your morning slice of toast, and it’s why you see Kermit the Frog on Mars.

It’s also why several prominent Apple blogs think they see an S (if they squint) in Apple’s WWDC invite, heralding the arrival, perhaps, of an iPhone 4S. Or it could be a 5, proclaiming the announcement of iOS 5. If you really squint, it even looks a little like an ampersand!

Hey, this is fun. What do you see? As a little bit of pre-WWDC frivolity, tell us in the comments the wackiest thing you see in the pareidolia of the WWDC invite.

[via Razorian Fly]

Is this a leaked photograph of the new iOS 5 home screen complete with a swanky new notification bar and a revamped camera icon, or simply the work of a talented Photoshopper?

With just under 10 hours still to go before Steve Jobs kicks off this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, some eager attendees are already forming lines outside San Francisco’s Moscone West. A famous face among the bunch is Jay Freeman (better known as Saurik), the creator of Cydia.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAhP-yLJJ9s

When Steve takes the stage tomorrow morning, it’s pretty much a sure bet that he will use the words, magical, amazing, beautiful, and extraordinary a few dozen times each as he introduces the new iOS 5, iCloud and OS X Lion. We’re sure that iOS 5 is going to be great, but the iOSMagic Team has dreamed up something more amazing than even Steve Jobs can deliver.

I’ve been asking for four years who would be first to ship the future of computing, a real desktop tablet: Apple, Microsoft or Google?

The WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointing devices) interface you’re using right now was invented during the Nixon administration. It’s old.

With the incredible success of the iPad, the world is definitely ready for the next evolutionary leap into the future, which will of course be desktop touch tablets. Google and Microsoft have already revealed how they’ll make their transitions. Yet Apple has revealed nothing. Will tomorrow be the day?

Check out these thoughtful mockups of iOS 5, the next version of the iPhone and iPad OS, which Steve Jobs is due to preview at WWDC on Monday morning.

They were created by Federico Bianco, a graphic designer from Rome, Italy. It’s a “wishlist” of all the things he wants to see in iOS 5, and includes some interesting ideas about notifications, widgets, Home Screen organization and bringing iPhoto to iOS.

Check it out:

Here’s a fascinating description of the iCloud/Time Capsule remote computing system Apple may reveal on Monday described by Steve Jobs himself — back in 1997.

“I have computers at Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself, it goes over the network and finds my home directory on the server and… I’ve got my stuff wherever I am…”

“…we were able to take all of our personal data, our home directories we call them, off of our local machines and put them on a server, and the software made that completely transparent…”

“…so in the last seven years, do you know how many times I have lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I have backed up my computer? Zero.”

Via MyService and MacRumors.

In an unprecedented move, last Tuesday Apple outlined what they would be announcing at next week’s WWDC keynote. This, in combination with plenty of plausible rumors floating round the blogosphere, leaves little left to speculate about. But I’m going to have a go anyway. I think the main theme for iOS5 will be independence from iTunes and the Mac/PC, and the big surprise for iCloud will be Facebook-style apps.

Read on after the break.

Apple has already revealed that Steve Jobs will talk about iCloud, iOS 5 and OS X Lion during his WWDC keynote on Monday morning.

In addition, it’s rumored that Apple’s wireless Time Capsule backup/router will get a big update.

Here’s how iCloud and the new Time Capsule will work, according to a source close to the company who asked not be identified. It’s pretty surprising:

Here’s a little reminder: check your iPhone 4 thoroughly for issues before your warranty expires. At this point in time, most iPhone 4s are still under their One-Year Limited Warranty — but not for long.

Here’s a partial list of some of the issues that may warrant a replacement:

As the impending launch of Mac OS X Lion creeps closer and closer, it’s getting harder and harder to wait for all of the new features Apple has promised, like Launchpad and AirDrop, just to name a couple. Well, if you want to get a taste of Mac OS X Lion before it’s here, there are a few quick things you can do to transform your aging install of Snow Leopard into a Lion like experience. In this video, I’ll show you what to do.

Amazon.com has listed for pre-order Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs, iSteve: The Book of Jobs. The 448-page book is being published by Simon & Schuster on March 6, 2012.

The official description reads:

From the creators of Echofon – the popular third-party Twitter client – comes Photofon; the easiest way to browse the photos posted in your Twitter timeline. This isn’t just another Twitter client, but rather a photo browser for those who enjoy viewing all of the photos posted by their friends.

Ranky is a great application for app developers, marketeers, and those who want to keep track of App Store games and applications. It provides you with an overview of how well your selected titles are performing and their position in the App Store’s charts.

Apple’s iWork office suite for iOS has just made its way to the iPhone and the iPod touch, and just like its iPad counterpart, you won’t find an office experience as good as this from anywhere else. For getting things done on the move, nothing compares to iWork.

Find out more about thus week’s must-haves below!

When Apple reveals iCloud at WWDC on Monday, it’ll have the kind of impact the iPod has had, predicts Kevin Fox, a Silicon Valley software veteran who’s worked at Apple, Yahoo and Google.

“The rumblings are huge,” says Fox, lead designer at Mozilla. Fox worked on Newton software before designing Yahoo’s chat service and then software for Google (including Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, and Google Reader 2.0). He continues:

… given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce [iCloud] on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.

Apple Stock Chart by YCharts

At the close of markets on Friday, Apple had a bigger market cap than Microsoft and Intel combined — the so-called Wintel alliance that almost buried Apple a decade ago.

Here’s how much Apple, Microsoft and Intel were worth on Wall Street at the end of the week:

Apple’s been promising that come Lion, OS X and OS X Server will be united… but with Snow Leopard Server costing $470 more than a retail copy of OS X, how will that go down?

New evidence suggests it’ll be simple: every copy of Lion will be able to function as a server, but you’ll need to enable that functionality by purchasing it through the Mac App Store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mP0CCytmoM

With notifications rumored to be a big part of iOS 5, Peter Hajas, the developer behind MobileNotifier for jailbroken iDevices, has reportedly been hired by Apple.