The arrival of Mountain Lion is undoubtedly the big news of the day, but certain commitments forced me to write this piece in advance so I'll return to that topic once I've installed the latest incarnation of OS X - or found specific reasons why I shouldn't rush into it after all.

What I am looking forward to is news of an iWork upgrade that takes advantage of the way iCloud is reportedly baked into Mountain Lion and provides round-trip compatibility with the corresponding iOS apps.

The other big story of the week was Apple's third-quarter results. The iOS family is still showing strong growth, though iPod sales continue to contract. As I've said before, very few people would want an iPhone and an iPod, so I doubt that's a concern for Apple, which still holds the lion's share of the MP3 player market.

Mac shipments managed to increase by just 2% - but that's at a time where overall PC shipments were estimated to have shrunk by 1%. So there may be some schadenfreude involved, but the numbers do give Apple's executive team more reason to concentrate on the iOS at the expense of the Mac.