Jason Snell

Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the Wall Street Journal’s tenth annual D: All Things Digital conference, appearing at the same event that his predecessor, Steve Jobs, had headlined several times before. Answering questions from conference hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Cook said his company is doubling down on Siri, played coy about Apple’s approach to the gaming and television markets, and spoke emotionally about Jobs’s death.

Double doubling down

As with any public appearance of an Apple executive, there was a good-natured give and take about future product releases. Mossberg and Kara tried to cajole Cook into revealing future product details, knowing full well that he would do no such thing. (In fact, the Apple CEO declared that the company was “doubling down on secrecy” when it comes to product releases.) However, he did offer a few tantalizing tidbits, most notably about the Siri feature of the iPhone 4S.

When Apple introduced iTunes in 2001, it served one purpose: As a music jukebox app. Later that year, it added its most important feature: The ability to sync tracks with the just-introduced iPod. Originally, you could just drag tracks onto your iPod and they’d copy over. iTunes had automatic music-sync features that were rudimentary, but they did the job.

That was a long time ago. These days, iTunes is simultaneously Apple’s most important and problematic product. It’s a music and video player. It’s a store, the gateway to buying music, videos, ringtones, and iOS apps. And of course, it’s a syncing system, connecting to Apple devices from iPhone to iPod to Apple TV.

The iPad has been a remarkable success story. Apple sold 15 million of the original model in the first nine months of the product’s existence, a number that blew away even the most optimistic prognostications. With last year’s introduction of the iPad 2, things kept accelerating. In a little less than two years, Apple has sold roughly 60 million iPads, dominating the market it created.

Maintaining Apple’s lead in tablet devices is the job of the third-generation iPad, a product that doesn’t mess with success. Like the iPad 2 before it, this new iPad is not a re-thinking of the original concept. Instead, Apple has chosen to focus on a few areas of improvement while keeping the overall package the same. Though it’s an approach that can frustrate people who are disappointed by anything that’s not a quantum leap, Apple executes it to perfection and reaps the rewards.

Apple is holding a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 7, and Macworld will be on hand with live coverage of whatever the company announces. Join us at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT for our blow-by-blow account of Apple’s latest unveiling.

The company is being typically cagey about what’s on the agenda for Wednesday: The invitation announcing the event only shows a hand hovering over an iPad and promises “something you really have to see. And touch.” That’s fueled speculation that Apple is planning to revamp its tablet. While we wait for Apple executives to take the stage Wednesday, we take a look at possible changes for a new iPad, including whether Apple will embrace 1080 video on the iPad 3 and Apple TV. Speaking of the Apple TV, we consider the possibility that it’s in line for an update as well.

The actual wording is in flux, but Mountain Lion will warn you if you try to open an app from an unidentified developer.Last year saw the arrival of the Apple-curated Mac App Store, a creation very much in the mold of the iOS App Store. And many people wondered: Would a locked-down version of Mac OS X, one incapable of running apps not approved by Apple, be far behind?

Apple certainly could have done something like that with Mountain Lion, the company’s planned update to Mac OS X that should arrive this summer. But it hasn’t—instead, the company has created a new way for developers to sign their work and a new set of options in the Security & Privacy preference pane. According to Apple, it’s all an attempt to improve Mac security. Here’s how the new Gatekeeper feature works.

Apple updates its iOS mobile operating system once a year. But why should the iPhone and iPad have all the fun? On Thursday Apple announced that it will release a new version of OS X—Mountain Lion—this summer, just a year after the release of OS X Lion.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion offers numerous feature additions that will be familiar to iOS users. This OS X release continues Apple’s philosophy of bringing iOS features “back to the Mac,” and includes iMessage, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring.

A "vast phishing attack" that attempts to capture the credit card information of Apple customers was launched on Christmas day, according to a report from Mac security-software company Intego.

In a posting on its Mac Security blog, Intego says that the attack is an attempt to fool Apple customers into clicking on a link under the guise of updating the billing information of their Apple accounts.

In the face of an avalanche of bad publicity, domain registrar GoDaddy is being accused by a competitor of dragging its feet on allowing customers to leave its service.

In a post on its blog, fellow domain registrar Namecheap reports that customers trying to transfer their domains away from GoDaddy are being delayed. The post accuses GoDaddy of "returning incomplete WHOIS information" as a part of the transfer process, a practice which is against the rules of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the process manager for the domain-name system.

Amazon announced last week that it's selling a million Kindles a week, and has done so for the past three weeks. Given the company's past refusal to say how many Kindles it's selling, this is big news… but things are still not as clear as you might think.

In the past, Amazon has announced Kindle sales milestones without giving real numbers. In November, the company declared it was the best Black Friday ever for the Kindle line, saying the Kindle Fire was "the bestselling product at Amazon for eight weeks running." The company has talked about Kindle sales growth and its rankings among Amazon's other products for years now, but never with any specific sales figures.

As the saying goes, the best camera you have is the one you have with you—and that makes your device’s camera one of its most important features. So it’s no surprise that Apple would bolster photography features with iOS 5.

If you’ve bought photography apps from the App Store in the past couple of years, you may find that some of the new photo features in iOS 5 offer similar functionality. But now those features will be available for everyone, on every iOS device that has a camera, with no App Store shopping spree required.

Sprint cleared up its policy regarding international roaming on the iPhone 4S Thursday, announcing its intent to lock the phone's micro-SIM slot and then unlock it for good customers only by request.

On Tuesday, I reported that Sprint and Verizon would handle "international unlocking" of the new iPhone 4S. The new phone is capable of working on those carriers in the U.S. and switching to the more common GSM radio standard for the rest of the world. My report said that Sprint's iPhone 4S would come with its GSM card slot "unlocked," meaning you could insert a pre-paid SIM card bought while traveling overseas if you wanted to save some cash on international phone surcharges.