New and Noteworthy: Apple to deliver earnings today: Preview; Seagate unveils half-terabyte drive; more

Apple to deliver earnings today: Preview Forbes has a preview of what is expected to be a stellar financial quarter for Apple, fueled by tremendous iPod and Mac sales growth. " Lifted by the early September debut of its newest iPod, Apple is expected to top Wall Street estimates as it continues dominating the digital music market. But analysts say investors are already looking ahead to Apple's December quarter and question whether the company will be able to meet lofty targets." More.

Seagate unveils half-terabyte drive Seagate has unveiled its new line of Barracuda 7200.9 drives, shipping in 4-GB to 500-GB capacities, with cache sizes ranging from 2 to 16 Mbytes. Manufacturer suggested pricing will be $61 for a 40-Gbyte parallel drive, $75 for an 80-GB SATA drive, and $429 for the high-end 500-GB SATA drive." More.

eWeek: Sun-Google deal will lead to online Office suite eWeek speculates that the so far lackluster Sun-Google deal will eventually result in a competitor to Microsoft Office "The true value of the new alliance between Sun Microsystems Inc. and Google Inc. lies not in the fairly innocuous mutual distribution deal the two companies announced here last week but rather in the myriad possibilities now open to them, officials and industry observers say. Under the agreement, the two companies will promote and enhance Sun technologies such as the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite and JRE (Java Runtime Environment). In return, Sun will include Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the JRE." More.

Firefox loses marketshare, Safari gains PC Pro reports that new figures from Internet monitoring firm NetApplications shows upstart browser Firefox has lost nearly a tenth of its market share between the months of August and September. "Firefox owned an 8.27 percent share of the browser market in August, says the firm, compared with September's 7.55 percent, a drop of about 9 per cent. In fact Firefox's market share has been pretty much on a downward path since its June peak of 8.71 percent." Meanwhile, Safari's share grew from 2.2 percent to 2.39 percent - around 8 percent growth rate. More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Retrospect 6.1: Slow-down, failure to backup clients from Retrospect server; FileVault problems; more
• Fix for Mail.app "Control-T" keyboard combination crash
• Burn folders reporting larger-than-actual data sizes, disallowing burning
• QuickTime 7.0.2 (#5): Vonage voicemail broken in Safari, other browsers
• Illustrator CS 12.0.1 (#3): Re-released updater fixes prior issues

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