SAN FRANCISCO — The survival of Apple beyond the 1980s comes down to a single piece of software, says Guy Kawasaki, bestselling author and Apple’s former chief evangelist. That single, miraculous piece of software — Aldus PageMaker — fueled a desktop publishing revolution, and saved Apple’s bacon in the process.

The comment came Tuesday during a highly entertaining keynote speech at the Ad:Tech conference here to promote Kawasaki’s new book, Enchantment. The book is a manual of persuasion in the mold of Dale Carnegie’s famous How to Win Friends & Influence People. (I’m reading it and will post a review soon.)

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Offering that imitation as a parody allows commentary while avoiding the Wrath of Legal. Spoofs of Apple commercials are certainly not a new phenomenon, but recently we’ve moved past Get A Mac and Dancing Silhouettes into the Jony Ive Era: soft music, featherlight products and dark T-shirts.

The world’s creative types have noticed, producing a stream of variations on Apple’s ubiquitous advertising. SlateV uses Ive himself to introduce one of Apple’s greatest technological wonders, the iPhone 4 Bumper.

The hiring of a Senior Composites Engineer at Apple has fuelled more speculation that the company could move away from aluminum for building future devices, choosing to use carbon fiber instead. Kevin Kenny began work at the Cupertino campus this month after spending 14 years building carbon fiber bicycles for Kestral Bicycles, where he was the President and CEO.

This isn’t the first time Kenny has worked with Apple; a patent called “Reinforced Device Housing” filed by the company in 2009 had Kenny’s name on it, and depicted an outer casing for electronic devices made from ultra-strong carbon fiber. The patent reveals Kenny was clearly working with Apple for a long time before he became a full-time employee.

Apple has been using Liquid Contact Indicators(LCI) in practically all of their devices for as long as I can remember, but it looks like with the iPad 2 they’ve stopped using them.

This makes sense because these sensors have not been all that reliable and subject to a lot of false positives from something as mundane as sweat. In 2009 this was a big news topic that I covered for CNET and I spoke to local Channel 2 news in Houston, Texas about complaints they had received from iPhone users. Even CNN had something to say about it.

It was so easy to trip these sensors that there was even a lawsuit over it.

I’m madly in love with my 11-inch MacBook Air, but sometime I wish I had a little more screen real estate for it… an external display that was as portable as it is.

Toshiba’s new portable LCD, the creatively christened Mobile LCD Monitor, looks like just the thing: it’s an iPad-thin 14-inch unit, allowing you to add a 1366×768 secondary display driven entirely by USB, no AC adapter required.

On the first day of spring, everyone’s favorite desktop feline has shaken the snow off its spots: Apple has just released Mac OS X 10.6.7, the latest update to their Snow Leopard operating system.

What’s new? Big fixes include a boost to Back To My Mac’s reliability, some minor updates to the Mac App Store, resolves an issue with transferring files to SMB servers and incorporates a number of security fixes.

Big bugs fixed include an issue with mid-2010 MacBook Air kernel panics, AirPort driver issues, improved brightness on external displays and a DVD player playback issue only seen on 64-bit Macs, as well as a rare issue that could cause users accounts to disappear after the system went to sleep.

In addition and per usual, the latest update to Snow Leopard supplements an already excellent operating system with the standard gaggle of enhancements to stability and compatibility.

If you want to check out the full list of changes, you can find it below. Otherwise, Mac OS X 10.6.7 can be downloaded through Software Update, or directly by clicking here.

A friend and I were talking today about the iPad 2, the Smart Cover, and the 31 magnets they contain today. We were pondering what would happen when we tossed the iPad 2 with an attached Smart Cover into our laptop bags right next to a MacBook with a standard hard drive inside. A co-worker of my friend had brought this up earlier leading us to the question, “Can the iPad 2 and Smart Cover magnets damage (or erase) our MacBook Hard Drive? ”

The clear answer is — No! The myth about magnets erasing data from hard disks or computers is mostly false and a hard one to shake since many of us were trained to keep the two apart. Let me explain why the myth isn’t exactly true.

Over at Etsy, Jositajosi is selling a selection of lovely hand-sewn cases for MacBook Air and iPad, using authentic Scottish tartans.

The latest MacUpdate Bundle is just an insanely good deal. For $50, you get Parallels, 1Password, App Tamer, Divvy, TechTool Pro 5, Civilization IV, DVDRemaster Pro 7, and a handful of others. This is actually one of the best bundles I’ve seen in a while: the Windows VM machine Parallels and the incredible password manager 1Password are indispensable on my Mac, while App Tamer helps stretch my MacBook Air’s battery to iPad-like levels, and Civilization IV remains the best iteration of Sid Meier’s classic strategy game. Get get get!

OK, this is a little WTF, and I haven’t yet been able to verify it myself (because reception’s pretty good where I live), but: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zante over the The Next Web says he’s discovered a trick to improve iPhone 4 reception: stick it in a glass.