Apple has announced that its new Mac Pro will be available to order starting Thursday. It unveiled the system in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference, surprising attendees with its cylindrical design. The aluminum body is just an eighth of the size of a standard tower unit -- 9.9 inches tall, 6.6 inches in diameter and weighing in at around 11 pounds.

It's damn near 2014, and what's the most baffling computing experience we have? The Apple TV television experience. It's so disappointing. We get new so-called TV channels -- or little Applets -- that give us a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the content available from a particular broadcast network, but it's also locked down so we have to be a cable television subscriber to view it.

Surf over to the Mac App Store, and you'll find plenty of utilities for keeping your Apple personal computer in tip-top shape. There are tools for freeing up RAM and cleaning files from disks and thoroughly uninstalling apps. Have you ever wished, however, that you had a an app to perform all those tasks under the same hood? IObit is doing that with MacBooster.

There's been some concern over the last year or so over slowing Mac sales. Instead of selling at wildly better rates than the constricting PC industry, Macs have been languishing. Of course, at the same time iPad and iPhone sales have been skyrocketing, so it's not hard to point a finger at iPads as a reason. Makes sense. iPads hold a heckuva lot of computing power inside their one-piece slab.

FiftyThree, which has earned kudos in the iPad community for its critically acclaimed art app Paper, has moved into the hardware business with a new stylus called "Pencil." The stylus, which looks like a carpenter's pencil, comes in two versions: a graphite offering for $49.95 and a walnut one for $59.95. "Its balance is beautiful," said Mobile Art Academy Education Director Caroline Mustard.

I was far up on the St. Joe Rive in Idaho one September, fly fishing with a buddy. We were filming some of the action because we were having such a great time. I spotted a big cutthroat trout and handed my friend the camera. Everything went perfectly: The trout rose and took my fly; I hooked it and fought the wild fish in a fun and spunky battle. Then I returned home and saw the footage.

Arizona this week welcomed Apple with open arms. The company will be opening a manufacturing facility there as it ramps up U.S. operations. The new plant will house production of sapphire materials as part of a $578 million deal between Apple and mineral crystal company GT Advanced Technologies. Apple uses the sapphire materials in some of its consumer devices.

In a flurry of presentations at its special media event on Tuesday, Apple introduced new iPads, MacBook Pros, the Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks -- available immediately, and free -- as well new generations of iWork and iLife app suites. The biggest buzz comes from Apple's brand new iPad, the iPad Air, which is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth-generation iPad that it replaces.

Apple on Tuesday sent out invitations to an undisclosed event to be held Oct. 22 in San Francisco, fueling fresh speculation about the company's planned product launches. It's widely expected that Apple will unveil new versions of the iPad and iPad mini. "The most solid rumors are that we'll see a 9.7-inch fifth-generation iPad," suggested Jeff Orr, a senior practice director at ABI Research.

Apple's traditional autumn iPad announcement event is slated for Oct. 22 this year, and while we don't know exactly where the event will go down, it seems pretty clear to just about any Apple-watching newshound that Apple will announce new iPads with the new 64-bit A7 processor. Some are claiming Apple will slim down the current iPad, retaining the screen size.

Apple on Tuesday launched a refresh of its iMac all-in-one computer with faster processors, communications and storage, as well as new graphics capabilities. The launch comes amid weak PC sales worldwide. So who would want a faster, better-connected desktop with advanced storage options and a massive hard drive? "Anyone who's a stone Apple PC user," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Just who killed the PC, anyway? For if it's not dead yet, it surely will be in a few years -- at least according to IDC, which now projects that worldwide PC shipments will fall by 9.7 percent this year, representing the largest market contraction on record. The market is expected to decline through 2014. Then, in 2015, IDC projects it will shift into single-digit modest growth.

Apple's retail operations can be counted among Steve Jobs' "babies"; the stores' slick design and sales techniques are legendary in the industry for their per-square-footage sales. In 2012, Apple retail store sales outpaced Tiffany's by 40 percent. Apple is in no danger of following in the footsteps of, say, J.C. Penney or Sears, but its retail operations have shown some worrisome signs of decay.

Biologists are using a novel blend of technology and data sharing to track endangered wildlife. A new report details the results of about five years of experiments in tracking the vocal activity of birds, frogs, insects and mammals. Researchers set up an automated remote biodiversity monitoring network designed to address one of the biggest challenges of working in environmental conservation.

Hard on the heels of the arrival of the Ouya video game console earlier this week, Google may be looking to get into the action. In fact, the company is currently working on an Android-powered console of its own, according to a Friday report. Apple is reportedly working on something similar as well. "There are too many screens to deal with," said IDC's Lewis Ward.

I spend freakish amounts of time in front of computer screens, most of it in front of my MacBook Pro, but also more hours than I care to recall in front of my Lenovo laptop PC. The OS, the apps, the trackpads, keyboards and mice are all important -- but they're also very traditional. What's not traditional is Leap Motion, which has created an astounding new way to interact with your computer.

Going into WWDC I think Apple enthusiasts were so pent up for some Apple awesomeness -- myself included -- that we let the soft and low-voiced cooing of design knight Jony Ive lull us into a receptive state more akin to the wooing of a potential partner than a critical study of design principles. It's not like we had beer goggles on going into the iOS 7 portion of the WWDC keynote, but. . .

In an attempt to revive its flagging reputation for introducing innovative products, Apple unveiled a new Mac Pro at its World Wide Developers Conference, being held in San Francisco this week. "Can't innovate any more, my ass," said SVP of Product Marketing Phil Schiller as the Mac Pro made its debut. The futuristic-looking black cylindrical device stands less than 10 inches tall.

There was no shortage of news coming out of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference this week, including a glimpse at the next generation of iOS. On the hardware front, meanwhile, the company revealed it will launch a new desktop computer and a refreshed MacBook Air line. Then, of course, there was its new streaming radio application.

Will we see an iWatch in 2014? Ming-Chi Kuo thinks so. In a research note this week, the KGI Securities analyst predicted that Apple had too much on its plate in 2013 to introduce a smartwatch, but is readying the device for next year. The company's entry into the wearable computer market will be a device that attaches to the wrist, Kuo said, but it will not be positioned as a watch.

Designers of operating systems can't think of everything that should be in their programs. Utilities are a testament to that. Utilities are software programs that do things that should have been included in an operating system, but weren't. They can help you keep your system performing at top speed or solve irritating problems.

The U.S. Justice Department is painting Apple as the "ringmaster" of an e-book price-fixing conspiracy. The news came out in court filings made public earlier this week as the DoJ prepares to do battle with the only member of the so-called conspiracy unwilling to admit wrongdoing and take a public spanking.

With iGoogle scheduled to be axed in November, orphans of that offering will be looking at alternatives like uStart, Protopage, Netvibes and Myfav.es. While those alternatives will meet the needs of many iGoogle users set adrift by the search company, some souls may want to create their own homepage substitutes for the versatile portal.

Wow. I don't think I've ever started any review with a "wow," much less an italicized wow, but here it is: That one word sums up my first impression of Silk -- Interactive Generative Art, an app for the iPad and iPhone. The app lets you create flowing, mirrored strands of silk-like lines of colored light. You do that simply by swiping and dragging your finger.

Google's Android offers up more cool homescreens and customizations than Apple's iOS. In iOS, you get to jiggle your stack of icons around on the iPhone or iPad homescreen and swap out the background photo. Woohoo. I can hardly contain my excitement. There are no live tiles, like Windows Phone. There are no fancy weather images, no retro themes.

Apple's fall from grace on the stock market over the past six months has been well documented, but investor confidence seems to have taken a turn for the better over the past week. The company worked its way onto two high-profile lists. It was the top company on Barron's 500 list, up from its second-place finish in 2012 and fourth in 2011.

Scapple isn't a spelling mistake for that Pennsylvania Dutch concoction made with pork scraps, corn meal, flour and spices. In fact, scapple is actually a word meaning to work roughly, or shape without finishing. It's also the name of a dynamite new mind mapping program from Literature and Latte, the folks who brought the Mac world Scrivner.

Compared to recent Apple announcements, the secrecy surrounding the next release of the company's mobile operating system, iOS 7, has almost been hermetic. There have been reports of improvements in email and calendar apps, as well as a possible expansion of the operating systems' gesture library so it will match Apple's OS X products.

Apple is reportedly working with automobile makers to push more integration of its operating system into vehicles. iOS 7 is expected to debut at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, and the refreshed version might launch with a total user interface overhaul led by company design guru Jony Ive. That update will include embedding Maps and Siri into new cars.

A week after announcing its first drop in quarterly earnings in a decade, Apple is selling $17 billion in bonds to fund a $100 billion buyback program for its stakeholders. The sale will be the largest non-bank bond deal ever. The move was somewhat unexpected coming from a company with $145 billion in cash on hand and no debt, a rarity among tech companies.