The topic of Apple in the enterprise can often be a heated one—as we've learned over the years via our forums and story comments. But according to a newly published report from Forrester Research, Apple is indeed "infiltrating the enterprise." Apple products have become a growing presence in many workplaces, and as a result, says Forrester, vendors will need to change the way they deal with their clients.

Forrester surveyed 9,912 workers in 17 countries to discover that 21 percent of "information workers" use one or more Apple products as part of their job (one percent reported using three Apple devices for work). The most common of those devices was an iPhone, followed closely by the iPad and then the Mac. Forrester says that close to 50 percent of firms in mature markets offer Macs at the office as well, but only 30 percent of survey respondents said their companies support them, "implying that a significant percentage of companies issue Macs but don’t officially support them."

Motorola's own patent war against Apple rages on, as the company has filed a new lawsuit in the US targeting Apple's iPhone 4S and iCloud service. Motorola's new lawsuit, filed in the US District Court of Southern Florida, asserts six patents against the iPhone 4S, with four of those same patents asserted against iCloud. This suit comes several months after two other federal lawsuits filed by Motorola against Apple, rounding out the list of Apple products that Motorola is going after with its patent portfolio.

The four patents Motorola is claiming against iCloud (hat tip to for rounding them all up) include for "multiple pager status synchronization," that describes a "method and apparatus for communicating summarized data," a " for communicating user-selected criteria filter prepared at wireless client to communication server for filtering data transferred from host to said wireless client," and a " and apparatus in a wireless messaging system for facilitating an exchange of address information."

The patents being claimed against the iPhone 4S are all of the above, plus for a "receiver having concealed external antenna," and an " for controlling utilization of software added to a portable communication device." Overall, it appears that Motorola is targeting iCloud and the iPhone 4S for being able to sync data stored on the iPhone wirelessly (via concealed external antenna, that is).

Motorola had originally attempted to add these claims to its  from 2010 that targets Apple's older hardware, iOS, MobileMe, and App Store. The company was rebuffed by the judge in that case, however, who said Motorola should assert the alleged infringements of the iPhone 4S and iCloud in a new lawsuit.

While the suit's arrival is not a huge surprise, it shows that Motorola is indeed still committed to fighting Apple along with HTC and Samsung. Apple hasn't been winning much lately against Motorola either—in December of 2011, that could potentially bar Apple's European sales arm from selling iPhones and 3G-equipped iPads. Earlier this month, the International Trade Commission by saying that Motorola didn't violate three of Apple's smartphone patents. A trial for Motorola's original suit is already on the calendar for this summer, so we'll soon find out whether US courts feel the same way as those in Germany and at the ITC.

When Mac OS X 10.7 Lion introduced full disk encryption, called , it was a huge improvement over the original FileVault, which only encrypts a user's home folder. And because of the "creative" way FileVault was implemented, there were numerous incompatibilities, gotchas, and caveats to its use. FileVault 2 on the other hand, encrypts individual disk blocks so the encryption is invisible to the file system and really doesn't get in the way of normal use. Adding to this is another new feature in Lion: the recovery partition and the network recovery system introduced in .

In almost all cases, these new features will work together without trouble. Still, there are a few things you should know, especially if you use encrypted Time Machine backups and if you can't depend on fast Internet connectivity to be available should your boot drive fail.

Apple plans to announce the results of its first fiscal quarter of 2012 this afternoon: January 24, 2012 at 2pm PDT. The results will be followed by the typical conference call where Apple executives will delve into the details of the results and answer questions from analysts.

As usual, we don't expect to hear much from Tim Cook or Peter Oppenheimer about unannounced products, but we do expect to hear how well the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and various Macs performed over the holiday season. The first fiscal quarter is typically a very strong one for Apple, so it's just a matter of time before we find out whether the results are good enough to please investors and Apple-watchers alike.

Ars will be doing a liveblog of the earnings call and the fiscal results this afternoon, so check back later to watch the goings-on and participate in the comments. The earnings call is scheduled to take place on January 24, 2012 at 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time ().

Apple's end user license agreement for the iBooks Author app has among authors and publishers. Namely, the agreement restricts paid distribution of "works" created with the software to the iBookstore only. Technical limitations may make the restriction a moot point for the time being, as only Apple's own iBooks apps can even read the files generated by iBooks Author. But forcing users to sell content through the iBookstore, governed by a separate contract with its own terms, might not survive an antitrust challenge in court if it were to come up. 

First, it's important to understand two aspects of iBooks Author—one technical, and one related to its license. The iBooks Author EULA has a stipulation that limits paid distribution of iBooks created with the software to the iBookstore. If you create something with iBooks Author and give it away, there are no limitations—put it on the Web anywhere you like. If you want to charge people money, you have to use the iBookstore and Apple gets a 30 percent cut.

Jorge Herskovic, a member of our community, wrote up a detailed account of his own experience working with OS X Lion Server for the benefit of our readers. We asked Herskovic to expand on his thoughts a bit and share them with the rest of us; he graciously agreed. Here's one computer geek's experience with trying to govern his home Apple gadgets with Lion Server.

First, two confessions: I am a huge Apple fan. I am typing this on my 27” iMac, which sits under a painting of the old rainbow Apple logo in my home office. I own six Macs (four at home, two at work), my wife and I have iPhones, I have an old iPod I use as a car jukebox, and I have an iPad, an Airport Extreme, an Apple TV, and an Apple TV 2. I’ve been to the Apple campus in Cupertino more than once—and I live in Texas. Heck, I’m wearing an Apple T-shirt as I write this. I’m a drooling Apple fanboi.

I'm also a UNIX-loving geek. My first Linux install was Slackware… from a stack of floppy disks, in 1993. I’m competent enough not to shoot myself in the foot too badly. I have owned and managed Linux machines before, still keep a Linux VM on my Macs, and have root to several Important Linux Servers at work. I’ve run mission-critical systems on Linux for more than one company.

A new isn't set to be fully ratified by the WiFi Alliance and IEEE until the end of 2012, but Apple may still be working to this year. The faster WiFi standard, known as 802.11ac, is already supported by chipsets from Broadcom, which supplies the WiFi chips used in most Apple products.

802.11ac operates exclusively on the 5GHz spectrum, using 80MHz or wider channels and more efficient modulation techniques to achieve data throughput three times or more faster than 802.11n. Broadcom introduced chips at CES that can use three antennas to transfer data as fast as 1.3Gbps while being as much as six times more power efficient than existing 802.11n chips. Such chips are also backwards compatible with 802.11n and other existing WiFi standards.

According to AppleInsider, Apple is expected to "rapidly deploy" the standard in its base stations and notebooks later this year. The suggestion is at least somewhat reasonable: Broadcom expects products using its new chipsets to begin shipping to consumers in the second half of this year, and Apple has been known in the past to quickly adopt new wireless standards, including 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0.

Whether or not the improvements indeed make it in to Apple's mobile products remains to be seen, of course. The iPhone and iPod touch both support 802.11n, but , not the faster 5GHz spectrum. The iPad, with its much larger battery capacity and room for extra antennas, does support 5GHz spectrum. The power efficiency of the newer 802.11ac chipsets may make 5GHz WiFi a viable option on newer iPhones, though antenna design could still be a limiting factor.

Apple held its education-focused event in New York City this week where it introduced the new iBooks 2, iBooks, Author, and iTunes U apps. Educators seem to feel pretty positive about the announcements, too, but that's not all that happened this week! We also interviewed several video pros on why the industry is inching away from Apple, discussed some next-gen iPad rumors, read through Apple's latest supplier responsibility report, and more. Read on if you need to catch up:

: Six months after the launch of Final Cut Pro X, video professionals are still feeling disgruntled. The industry is beginning to lean away from Apple in favor of other software and hardware.

: Just as we , Apple has announced iBooks 2, an interactive textbook application for the iPad, and iBooks Author, a Mac app to allow authors to create those textbooks. "Education is in the dark ages," the company said, which is why it wants to "reinvent textbooks."

Educators so far seem  about the potential promise of a learning "revolution" enabled by Apple's new . However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn't fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author's end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

iBooks created by iBooks Author use ePub 2 along with certain HTML5 and JavaScript-based extensions that Apple uses to enable multimedia and interactive features. Those interactive features will only work with Apple's iBooks app, not with other e-reader software or hardware, because only Apple supports those extensions.

Still, there shouldn't be any technical limitation to exporting a strictly ePub 2-compliant ePub document if none of the interactive features are used. Unfortunately, iBooks Author only exports PDFs and text.

Apple announced iBooks 2 on Thursday, targeting the education market with an upgrade to the iBooks app for iOS. Though the updated e-book reader is advertised in the App Store as iBooks 2, users who currently have the first iBooks app will just see it as an update. Using iBooks Author, educators and other publishers will be able to create interactive e-books for the iBooks app. Though Apple has placed much of its focus on promoting the app's new multimedia features, the new iBooks 2 showcases several changes to its user interface. Some of these changes are meant to accommodate the more interactive features built into the format, though users may feel disoriented by having to learn new interactions to learn how to use these textbooks.

E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth is the only title freely available right now, so we downloaded a copy to explore the changes to the iBooks interface. We also used a copy of Michael Pollan's non-fiction title Botany of Desire to compare some of the original features and gestures used for iBooks against the new textbooks.