Microsoft has increased the price of Office for Mac by up to 17 per cent, another move in the software giant's territory battle with Apple in the personal computing market. The new pricing structure, which was not officially announced by Redmond, asks Mac users to hand over around the same amount as users of Office 2013 for …

The former head of Apple Retail has found a new job, selling handbags and scarves at the head of Monsoon's Accessorize chain. John Browett only lasted seven months at Cupertino, before Tim Cook edged him out in a reshuffle in September that also saw the end of Apple's software chief Scott Forstall. Browett is credited with …

Exclusive Networks, a pan-European IT distie, has announced fat revenue growth of 30 percent in its annual report for 2012. The French company said its revenue of €279m (£240m) for the year gone beat expectations, and claimed it was up a third on 2011's revenue of €214m (£184m). Yearly profits were said to be up by 22 percent …

HP-owned software house Autonomy faces more probing, this time by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC). The British corporate governance watchdog announced today it will investigate allegations that the Brit biz overinflated its value by $5bn just before Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2011. HP's buy-up of Autonomy for $10.7bn is …

Apple is still riding clear at the top of the global tablet market, though it has lost 8 per cent of its share of sales since the same time last year. Its tablet rivals, meanwhile, experienced triple-digit growth compared to the final quarter of 2011. This is according to the latest stats from IDC, which showed Samsung and ASUS …

Samsung urged a note of caution for the future, despite announcing bumper profits for the last three months of 2012. The two big drivers that powered the Korean super-manufacturer to record revenue of 56.06 trillion Korean won ($52.7bn, £33.3bn) at the end of 2012 are showing signs of decelerating. Samsung execs expect cooler …

The Apple exec tipped to take over as head of its Retail unit has just quit the company, it was announced yesterday. Jerry McDougal, vice president of Retail at Apple since 2000 has resigned to spend more time with his family. McDougal's exit comes three months after his former boss John Browett, was booted out from his role as …

Hewlett-Packard has stayed at the top of the PC industry, fending off competition from Lenovo to remain the biggest PC vendor in the world with 16.2 percent market share. But the industry as a whole is shrinking, and new stats from research firm Gartner confirm the gloomy prognosis from IHS last week. Dell performed badly, with …

The European Commission's new action plan that encourages entrepreneurship in order to boost economic growth says that member states should target their support at the sections of society least likely to be sitting on beanbags in Shoreditch. Groups such as seniors, migrants, the unemployed and women should be encouraged into …

Samsung Electronics has released its pre-earnings guidance ahead of revealing its full figures for 2012, and the topline figures for the quarter show that money has been pouring in for the South Korean tech titans. Sales for the last three months of 2012 brought in approximately 56 trillion won ($52.7bn) for Samsung with an …

HP's chief of personal systems has branded Microsoft's Surface "kludgey" in a broadside against the new laptop-cum-tablet hardware. Todd Bradley dismissed the fondletop in an interview with IDG's CITEworld, and said although the tech press is obsessed with it, the public couldn't care less about Microsoft's 10-inch offering. It …

Apple sold three million iPad 4s and iPad Minis in the weekend after the device launched, Apple announced in a bullish release today that described the sales as "record-breaking". Sales were double the 1.5 million sales of the iPad 3 in its first weekend in March. “We set a new launch weekend record and practically sold out of …

Cornwall Council has stalled a £300m ten-year deal to outsource its call centres and other IT systems to the private sector. The county's councillors voted 93-0, with seven abstentions, to put the brakes on the contract, snubbing BT and CSC which had each put in bids for the huge cash pot. The move came after 6,000 people signed …

They may not be sleeping on the street in hopes of being the first to get their mitts on it, but Brits do seem enthusiastic about the new Microsoft Surface tablet. Preorders of the device have already sold out in the UK, the Microsoft UK site shows – at least the £399 32GB version. The £599 64GB version is still available. A …

Staff at RIM's UK headquarters were upset to see their VP tweeting about foie gras as they learned that the hundreds of them who will lose their jobs by the end of the year will be receiving the bare minimum redundancy payout that the government allows. A source told The Reg that the staffers who will be out the door before …

HMRC has become the first government department to sign a cloud contract through the G-Cloud, the government's online IT services catalogue. Yesterday HMRC signed the contract with Skyscape Cloud to migrate all the tax collectors' data to the cloud over the next six months. It's one of the biggest contracts to be awarded through …

Japanese IT group Fujitsu is among several companies that have been "blacklisted" by the UK Government, claims the Financial Times. It means that Fujitsu, G4S and other unnamed companies will not be considered for future public sector contracts when they come up for tender because of their poor performance on past and existing …

Apple is beefing up its presence in Russia, according to rumours in the Russian financial daily Kommersant. Apple has registered a company called Apple Rus and assigned Vitaly Morozk, the company’s local legal advisor, as its director general, reports the paper. Allegedly, opening stores in President Putin's back garden is not …

Good news for would-be tablet owners without a pile of cash to spend: prices have dived 13.6 per cent in the past year – if you don't count the iPad. Apple's tablet came down in price too, but only by 3.45 per cent. And that's because being cheap is the best way to get noticed for non-Apple tablets, says IMS market analyst Gerry …

Apple is cutting down on UK retail staff at its stores in Milton Keynes and Essex: blueshirted fanbois on short-term contracts will get the heave-ho, sources in the Mac channel claim. Industry talk of layoffs in Apple's shops surfaced in MacRumours earlier this week. Apple has refused to officially comment though a contradictory …

Acer plans to flog 500 "Olympic" laptops to school children in North East London after the Games close. The Taiwanese firm has also promised that the other 15,900 computers they put into London 2012 will be packaged up and sent into schools around the UK. The PCs were used for everything from planning athletes' travel to …

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which bungled building a central patient database for the NHS, suffered a 78 per cent drop in profits year-on-year in its last quarter. CSC reported a net income of $42m for Q1 of fiscal year 2013 [PDF], down from $185m banked in the same period last year. Revenue stayed roughly the same as …

A UBS analyst has said Hewlett Packard should shed its PC and printer biz in a report that reopens old and sticky wounds. Rumours of a PC biz spin-out first surfaced last year, during former CEO Leo Apotheker's reign. By contrast, current big boss Meg Whitman has famously likened any spinoff of the units to breaking up a family …

Lawsuits are all that remain of France's biggest Apple reseller after no credible bidders came forward to save the business. eBizcuss officially went into liquidation on 31 July, after 36 years of trading. We understand that there were at least two offers for the reseller but none were sufficient to save the business. eBizcuss …

Strong smartphone sales banked Samsung a $4.56bn profit in the three months to 30 June, according to its latest bean counting exercise. The South Korean giant posted a 48 per cent year-on-year rise in net income in preliminary results announced last night [PDF]. Despite the economic chill that has seen even Apple's growth hit …

iPhone supreme leader Tim Cook said Apple's $2.2bn revenue fall in China this quarter was caused by Cupertino flooding the distribution channel with unwanted stock. Sales in the authoritarian regime tumbled from $7.9bn in Q2 to $5.7bn in Q3, a 27 per cent drop although they were up 48 per cent year-on-year. While defending …

Thirteen optical disc drive resellers are being investigated by the EU on its suspicions that the firms may have broken antitrust laws and artificially suppressed the price they paid for the drives. The resellers are suspected of acting as a worldwide cartel for at least five years, the European Commission said, laying out its …

Apple was sued 75 times on Tuesday as former employees of reseller eBizcuss filed individual suits against the iPhone-maker in Paris. eBizcuss was the biggest reseller of Apple products in France until the end of May, when the firm went into administration. In December the eBizcuss CEO Francois Prudent claimed that the financial …

Services and systems colossus Serco has taken charge of more government contracts by buying out Vertex Public Sector's data division: Vertex Data Science (VDS). Serco splashed £55.5m in cash on the division - bringing in 3,000 employees and scooping its meaty government contracts, including administering child maintenance grants …

The average price of a tablet computer dropped 21 per cent in the first three months of 2012 - making $386 (£250) the average amount that customers pay for a slab. Figures compiled by IMS research show the striking drop, which the tracker company attributed almost entirely to Apple. Apple's price cut on its iPad 2 model in …

Richard Schulze, the man who built tech megastore chain Best Buy out of an audio store he set up in Minnesota in 1966, has exited the company abruptly - causing the shares to take a hit. Falling profits, a troubled a withdrawal from Europe and sex scandal allegations that took out Best Buy's CEO Brian Dunn have tamed the retail …

Apple's largest authorised reseller in France – eBizcuss – has gone bust, closing all its outlets and firing its staff. The chain had 120 employees across 15 shops in France and Belgium, according to L'Express, and ran several other businesses including services businesses KA Services and ICLG, which are also closing. Staff …

iPad sales trounced sales for netbooks and notebooks in the first quarter of 2012 pushing Apple to the dominant position in the mobile PC market, show new figures from analysts NPD. NPD ran together tablets with netbooks and notebook PCs in their "Mobile PC category" and skyrocketing iPad sales of 13.6 million in the first three …

The NHS is paying double or even triple normal prices for trivial tech gear including printer parts, cables and optical mice, according to a poll of IT bosses. Here's just one example of how the Department of Health is cutting deals that are worse than what other wholesale buyers are getting - and worse than what average punters …

Apple is recalling a batch of Mac Pro towers in the UK after a "small number" sold last month turned out to have defective hard disks, Channel Reg has learned. The dodgy drives put fanboys' data at risk, Apple said in its recall notice. One UK biz boss told us that he was chasing down a small number of the several hundred Mac …

American distie Arrow Electronics has scooped up smaller Irish-owned rival Altimate Group for €48.1m. Channel-bestriding behemoth Arrow bought the distributor off Irish financial holding company DCC. Altimate is DCC's Enterprise distribution business and in 2011 reported a yearly operating profit of €3.7m on €257m of global …

Once the nerdy niche player, Apple is now officially mainstream: the majority of American households own at least one device from Cupertino, according to a CNBC survey of gadget ownership. The survey found that the typical Apple owner still tends to be male, college-educated, younger and lives on the West Coast. (CNBC collected …

The Kindle Touch will be out in the UK from 27 April, and is available to pre-order on Amazon from today. At a cost of £109 (with free delivery), the Wi-Fi Kindle Touch has a multi-touch E Ink display – making it a step-up from the button-clicking vanilla Kindle. The Kindle Touch has a two-month battery life and text to speech …

Apple's iPad share of the fondleslab market slipped slightly in the last quarter from 61.5 per cent to 54.6 per cent. But with the demand for tablets booming and Apple selling 15.4 million units in the last quarter of 2011, it's unlikely anyone will shed tears over these results in Cupertino. The 2011 Q4 stats from IDC show a 56 …

Despite Tim Cook's declaration that we live in a post-PC world as he presented the new iPad to the world, analysts at Gartner forecast that demand for PCs will accelerate in the next two years. Apple CEO Cook dreams of a world in which fondleslabs not only outsell PCs but render them irrelevant. These stats suggest otherwise. …

If selling software is one way to make money, selling other people's software is an even easier way to make money – just take a look at the App Store. Fujitsu is importing the app store model into enterprise software, opening up a Business Solutions Store, where users can browse apps and buy subscriptions to software services by …

Demand for hard disk drives will outstrip supply until at least the middle of 2012, analysts at IHS reckon, as a result of the deadly Thai factory floods that dented drive production. Disk assembly rates will creep up during 2012 but prices will remain high. Shipments of hard drives are expected to rise in every quarter, year-on …

Apple has begun to send independent inspectors into its Chinese factories, a release today states. Apple's pledge to have its assembly line factories inspected by the independent Fair Labor Association (FLA) was part of its more rigorous Supplier Code of Conduct issued in January this year. It followed revelations about …

Prototypes of the hotly anticipated Apple TV are sitting in the offices of telcos in Canada, reports newspaper The Globe and Mail. The report adds that the new TVs will feature voice-control through Siri, gesture control and video chat. Apple has sent out the prototypes of its "iTV" device to help it cut deals with local …

Amazon could be about to open a bricks-and-mortar store in Seattle aimed at selling the Kindle - according to rumours on blog goodereader. Amazon execs are impressed by Apple's trendy hangouts shops, said the goodereader source, and want to get a piece of the boutique retail pie. The Seattle store would test out the concept and …

The contrast between Apple's prestige city-centre stores and the Sam's Club warehouse chain – where budget goods are sold straight from the pallet – is sharp. But that's where Apple wants to set up mini stores to sell its gadgets. There are about 600 Sam's Club retail warehouses across America selling everything from exercise …

Rumours - fuelled by comments from a MasterCard chief and an iOS developer - suggest that this year's next-gen iPhone could be packing a wireless pay-by-wave chip. The built-in near-field communication (NFC) gizmo would allow the iPhone 5 to make contact-less payments at the tills - a system that has been around on Android …

The Dutch have found themselves on the front line of the long-running international patent battle between Apple and Samsung: an appeals court in The Hague has rejected Apple's design-related gripes against Samsung's Galaxy Tab tablet, snubbing its request for a ban on the sale of the iPad rival in The Netherlands. The Hague …

Russian, American and European space agencies are in talks to create a human colony on the Moon, according to Russian news source Rianovosti. MOON_STATION Artist's impression of the Moon station from Nasa's Global Exploration Roadmap Russia wants to build either a space base on the surface of the Moon itself or a space …

Amazon is reportedly pumping $95m (£61m) into an e-commerce distribution centre in the Chinese city of Nanning, Guangxi Province. The Kindle maker inked a deal with the Economic and Technological Development Zone in Nanning on Monday, according to a report in The Shanghai Daily. The warehouse located in the Beibu Gulf Technopark …