After taking a few days to come up with a suitable explanation as to why a certain tracking file was present in the iPhone, iPads, and other gadgets that detected your whereabouts, Apple last week offered a reasoned and reasonable explanation of why it was present, and its purpose. In short, if you want to use the Location feature, to allow apps to know where you were, that file was required to cache the information.

The matter seemed trivial enough, until security researchers discovered that the file wasn’t deleted when you turned off your iOS gadget’s Location feature. Worse, it was still backed up when you synced your gadget to iTunes on a Mac or a PC.

Now in theory, the relevant data, even if it was somehow retrieved by outsiders, would only provide a general indication of nearby network access points (cell towers and Wi-Fi routers) you may have accessed during your travels. Certainly, what you were actually doing couldn’t be recorded, but if your employer monitored you in that fashion, and found that you were hanging out near a night club in one city, when you were supposed to be attending a business conference in another, you’d be in real trouble. And deservedly so.

More seriously, Apple admitted that the tracking file should have been zapped when you turned off Location, only it wasn’t. Also it was far too large, thus storing data for months rather than days. They promised a solution in a few weeks, but there’s something about under-promising and over-delivering that can strike a positive chord. So on Wednesday morning, iOS 4.3, with most of the promised fixes, was delivered.

The update restricts the data file to seven days duration, and won’t copy it to your Mac or PC when you’re syncing your iOS gadget. The file will no longer be present when Location is off; a future iOS update will actually encrypt the file.

So far, early reports indicate that the fixes have indeed been made, so I wonder what’s going to happen to that pending lawsuit against Apple over this issue, although the instigators of that action will likely find other causes to keep it going. After all, Apple should have known what they were doing, and perhaps they released the fix when they were caught, not because their employes are human and make mistakes.

Most of you will probably be content to seek out other conspiracies to be concerned about, and I’m certain there are plenty to be found out there.

Meantime, there appears to be some more genuine Mac malware in the wild, in the form of a false antivirus program that is known as Mac Defender. It shows up by tricking search engines to display certain links, which take you to a fake Web site displaying a bogus Windows-style virus warning. After pretending to scan your computer, you’re warned that your Mac is infected, and you are offered an app to fix it.

Stay with me now, as this gets complicated.

The download comes in the form of a standard Zip archive, one that’s acceptable to Safari if you have the “Open ‘safe” files after downloading” option selected; it might make sense to turn this preference off. After the download is complete, the file is decompressed, launching a standard Mac OS X Installer. Understand that the Internet criminals behind this scheme are smart. The installer screen appears perfectly normal, as is the bogus app that’s installed, which looks and feels very much the same as any other Mac app.

But get this: If you run the app, it will force Safari to take you to a porno site, and you’ll be offered a subscription to Mac Defender to protect you against such “unwelcome” intrusions.

The scheme is obvious. You are being asked to pay for an app subscription because of the fake warnings, and you will be buying software that doesn’t do anything other than to induce you to keep up your subscription. Beyond stealing your money, your Mac appears to be uninjured, except, of course, for Mac Defender’s efforts to sell you something you don’t need. Clearly the characters who devised this scheme found a clever way to profit from this fraud.

Meantime, genuine Mac security programs are being updated to stop Mac Defender in its tracks, along with a variant, known as Mac Security. But the easiest way to defend yourself is not to install that garbage, or any program unless you are dead sure you wanted it.

Now this sort of scam is already present in the Windows world, where similar bogus apps tailored for that platform have long been available. As the Mac continues to expand way faster than Windows PCs, you can bet that more and more malware authors will be in search of greener pastures. If you are vigilant in what you install on your Mac, you have nothing to worry about, at least for now. If you do feel you need an app to protect yourself against malware, visit the Mac App Store, or check a responsible dealer, such as Amazon, or any of the Mac-specific online retailers, to find real products that actually offer value in exchange for your payment.

Some time back, a few people decided to post some Tweets and blogs erroneously claiming that I expected Apple to stop building the Mac Pro then and there, or in the not-too-distant future. As regular readers of these columns realize, I’ve said no such thing. While I have addressed a possible future end to Apple’s professional desktop workstation, I don’t expect that Apple will do that unless or until sales dip significantly.

Sure, the vast majority of sales of new Macs these days are note-books. The refreshed MacBook Pros, along with the MacBook Air — which is expected to also receive an upgrade soon — have dominated the market. The new iMac may move that scale someone back towards desktops, but a lot more is going on here.

Today’s Mac Pro contains Intel Xeon chips, which are widely used in Web servers because of their reliability. They can work 24/7 for months on end without need of repair. In addition, the Xeon uses expensive ECC memory, defined this way, according to the Wiki on the subject: “RAM with ECC or Error Correction Code can detect and correct errors.” While ECC RAM, in theory, means greater reliability at the expense of somewhat slower performance, I’m not sure that real world memory problems occur that often. If you have a computer with bad memory, that will manifest itself with increased crashes and other untoward behavior easily fixed by replacing the defective component.

By making quad-core Intel Sandy Bridge processors standard on the 2011 iMac, and on many MacBook Pro configurations, Apple has seriously raised the performance bar. They claim from 30% to 70% faster than last year’s iMac. You’ll also find high-performance graphics hardware, and the growing availability of solid state drives.

But the icing on the cake is Thunderbolt, the speedy peripheral port Apple and Intel designed, which, in essence, adds external PCI Express support. That means that some peripherals that would have been designed to be placed inside a Mac Pro can be reengineered in external cases to support a far greater number of products. At first, you’ll be seeing RAID drives, but, in theory, anything that can take advantage of 10 gigabits per second input and output speeds. The 27-inch iMacs have two of them, and multiple peripherals can be daisy chained. What’s more, two 30-inch displays are supported, in addition to the internal monitor. Imagine the possibilities.

When it comes to the iMac’s AMD Radeon graphics processors, Apple marketing VP David Moody provides a telltale comment in a Macworld interview, saying the chips offer “Mac Pro-class graphics.”

So do you see where Apple is taking you?

What this means is that more and more Mac users can do heavy-duty 3D graphics and other content creation chores on regular desktop-class Macs. They do not need to invest thousands more in a fully outfitted Mac Pro. This doesn’t mean the iMac is a direct replacement. Certainly, there is the benefit of two six-core processors, which gives the Mac Pro a leg up. But that’s the sort of advantage only a small number of customers will care about.

A fully decked out customized 27-inch iMac adds just a few hundred dollars to the standard $1,999 purchase price.  Once you pay for the dual Xeon “Westmere” processors on a Mac Pro, the price starts at $4,999 with 6GB of RAM. It’s very easy to check a few options, such as extra internal drives, a RAID card, and other extras, and boost the price to well beyond $10,000. Productivity has to improve by an awful lot to justify that sort of investment, though I expect Hollywood special effects artists will regard the expense as trivial compared to the tens of millions they waste in filming a summer blockbuster.

Future Intel consumer chips will add extra cores, and I wouldn’t dismiss the prospects of putting two of them on a single logic board, something that’s the province of the Xeon these days. But that luxury will be less useful when eight or more cores are standard issue on a single affordable chip.

Up until two years ago, I would never have given serious consideration to using an iMac as a direct replacement for a Mac Pro. But Apple’s David Moody is telling you that they expect more and more professional users to abandon their Mac towers during their next computer upgrade cycle.

But before you take that as evidence that I expect a near-term demise for the Mac Pro, consider the published reports of a forthcoming 3U refresh, thinner and lighter, which will fit perfectly into a server rack. That, and continued sales from professional customers who require the fastest desktop workstations on the planet, will assure a continued existence for the Mac Pro.

At least for now.

But if you could get 98% of the capability of a Mac Pro for less than 25% the price, why would you spend the extra cash? Serious business customers have to think twice as to how paying so much more for a Mac Pro will provide a better return on their investment. I’ll be revisiting this subject from time to time, but, once again, I would be the last to declare the impending death of the Mac Pro.

Every few months, another Mac gets an update. Except for the extra promotion about moving to unibody enclosures, and the last MacBook Air upgrade, the product refresh is announced with little more than a press release, and perhaps a few brief interview opportunities with senior Apple executives, but not Steve Jobs.

More interesting is that whatever Apple does receives worldwide press coverage, not just from a bunch of “crazed” Mac fanatics, or however they are to be labeled, but from the mainstream media as well. It’s big news. At the same time, when was the last time you read about a new personal computer from Dell, HP, or, for that matter, any of the other Windows licensees? Even when there are press releases, how many of those releases actually get published outside of a PC publication?

It’s more important, though, to look at the impact of the new Mac introduction? How many of you have older Macs that are sorely in need of an upgrade, but you keep waiting for the right product cycle before making that investment? Understandably, it’s a little more difficult these days to justify purchase of a new computer, Mac or PC, when the present machine is still doing its job. Unless you have loads of money to burn, or need to stretch the limits of your existing hardware, it’s not easy to justify the expense from any rational standpoint.

For those of you with pre-Intel Macs, it makes more sense. The last major OS upgrade that supported PowerPC hardware came out in 2007; only maintenance and security fixes have appeared since. That’s an eternity in the PC industry, and loads of newer apps simply won’t support such aging hardware.

Even then, I understand that some of you have to think this through carefully. Yes, an older Mac still has some cash value, though rapidly diminishing, if it’s in a good state of repair. But it’s not just the cost of the new machine, but the latest and greatest app upgrades that will allow it to do its best. I know of one graphic artist who is evidently doing well by his Power Mac, and still can’t justify the expense of modernizing his production systems. Even if he restricts himself to a new Mac, it’s possible that the older apps won’t work properly. It’s not always so easy to make do, and perform the needed upgrades gradually.

If you have a more recent Mac, perhaps you can stay on the sidelines for a while longer. My 27-inch iMac was built in late 2009, and I’d have to decide whether the performance improvement of a refreshed model makes a real difference for me. Will I really be able to profitably exploit the changes? If not, I can save my money, unless my existing iMac develops a serious hardware problem that, without a service contract, renders repair costs unreasonable.

Such an upgrade is more difficult to justify with my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro. Yes, the new Intel Sandy Bridge chips offer a huge, quite noticeable, performance boost over the dual-core Intel i7 on my note-book. If I could survive the high cost of migrating to a solid state drive, the speed improvement would be incredible, since so much of what you do depends on reading and writing data to a storage device. Perhaps the Thunderbolt peripheral port will also be significant, once there is a wide selection of peripherals, assuming I needed any of them.

I realize Apple hopes you’ll upgrade every couple of years or so, to fuel Mac sales. At the same time, since they continue to claim that 50% of the customers buying Macs at their retail stores are new to the platform, I’m sure their expectations are realistic.

The good thing about a Mac is that you can get three or four years of reliable service without finding yourself left behind with the latest and greatest app and OS updates. But there are still millions of long-time Mac users with legacy hardware doing full-time production duty. Other than hard drives, and perhaps power supplies, Macs usually have a pretty good reliability record. Yes, Apple does institute extended repair programs from time to time, but not so much recently.

Once your Mac has outlived its usefulness, you can still get a little cash for one via eBay, or a dealer in used Mac hardware. Or just pass it down to your children, as I did with my son, Grayson, and other relatives. In fact, that 2003 vintage PowerBook G4 I bought shortly after it came out is still in regular use by my sister-in-law. I had to repair a broken optical drive, and replace a bad RAM module, but it still runs quite decently with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. At least they’re not complaining.

Compare that to a 2003 PC from any of the major PC makers. How many of them would still function reliably eight years later? Sure, maybe you can get a suitable PC for less money than a Mac, but when you consider the actual upkeep cost, the scale tips sharply in the other direction. So long as Apple continues to build reliable gear, that situation isn’t going to change.

I used to collect radios, lots of them. Maybe that’s why I got into broadcasting in the first place, since I could actually be heard on one of those contraptions. Indeed, during my long-ago teen-aged years, I built a few, ranging from simple models with a few spare parts, to full-blown multichannel receivers. Unless I’m totally wrong, one of my close friends of that era is actually using the FM radio tuner I assembled for him with a screwdriver and soldering iron.

One lesson I learned then is that radio reception is unreliable, and can vary all over the place. Even FM, which can deliver nearly pristine sound under ideal conditions, may present difficulties, as most of you know. If you move the radio or antenna around, reception will improve. I also discovered, early on, that my hands would become part of the circuit, and then the quality of the signal would depend on their proximity.

The most frustrating lesson was learned before I got cable TV, when I used an regular antenna to pick up local stations. Consider the time, years ago, when I lived in a small apartment, and had a rabbit ears antenna affixed to the family TV; the rental office wouldn’t permit an external antenna, and I didn’t want to invest in cable. Well, it was frustrating to carefully point the two ends of the antenna in the right direction, only to have the picture get snowy again as soon as I moved my hands away.

Now, from a purely scientific standpoint, there should be no mystery whatever why this occurs, and how your hands, essentially two large sacks of liquid, can hurt or enhance reception. Certainly cell phone makers know this. Some tell you in the manual not to hold a handset the “wrong” way, and a few models even have warning stickers affixed to the sensitive location. Nobody seemed to care, until the iPhone 4 arrived in 2010.

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