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Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.
"Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."

Steve Jobs announced the new 3G iPhone at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference today.

After a long presentation of the new development tools and corporate features that the phone's updated operating system, "iPhone 2.0," will support, Jobs finally got to the details about the next-generation phone that has been rumored for months. To wit:

    * According to Jobs the new handset's 3G data capabilities will enable it to access the Internet 2.8 times faster than the current iPhone can.

Late Tuesday, in response to questions from Forbes.com, an Apple spokesman said Apple has agreed to buy a boutique microprocessor design company called PA Semi. The company, which is known for its design of sophisticated, low-power chips, could spell a new future for Apple's flagship iPhone, and possibly iPod products as well.

The 150-person chip company, P.A. Semi, was founded in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl, who was a lead designer for the well-regarded Alpha and StrongARM microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment in the 1990s.

However well customers are taking to Windows Vista, its replacement is only in the earliest stages of development, according to a statement from Microsoft.

The Redmond, Washington-based software giant dashed hopes of an early release of Windows 7 in 2009 in an e-mail message from a company spokesperson, suggesting instead that the operating system was too far away to be ready for a commercial release next year.