Judging from most press reports over the last couple of months, you’d think Apple has done a horrible job of protecting the safety of the Chinese workers who manufacture most of its devices. Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest manufacturers, is actually a behemoth that builds cell phones, computers, tablets, and other technology for most of the big companies around the world. Nick Bilton of the New York Times started asking these other firms — including Dell, HP, Samsung, and Microsoft — about how they’re responding to working conditions. The answers? Silence, pat press releases, and very little actual information.

Forget about connecting an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to your Mac with a cable. When you need to transfer images (both from and to the device), PhotoSync is quick and easy.

If you own a Sonos speaker system, or another non-Apple device that reads your iTunes library, you may be missing something: songs you purchased prior to 2009 that are still encumbered by Apple’s FairPlay DRM. But with iTunes Match, you can download DRM-free, higher-quality versions.

Intuit has released Quicken Mac 2007 OS X Lion Compatible, a reengineered version of the five-year-old finance application that works with Mac OS X 10.7. Yes, really.

Apple sent out a press release over the weekend highlighting what just a short time ago sounded like an impossible milestone: the 25 billionth App Store download. (Yes, that’s ‘billion’ with a B — just imagine Carl Sagan saying it in “Cosmos.”) The celebrated app in question was Disney’s Where’s My Water? Free, a game where you help friendly Swampy the Alligator fix the plumbing in the city’s sewers where he lives so he can take a shower. The app was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China, who will be receiving a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

An iPad 2 or iPhone 4S can mirror its display on an Apple TV, but not on a Mac. With the Mac OS X application Reflection, the iOS screen can now be mirrored on your Mac — perfect for giving presentations or recording what’s happening on the device.

Apple has scheduled a media event for March 7th in San Francisco, where the company is expected to unveil the next model of the iPad.

Fraser Speirs digs deep into iTunes U now that the service has graduated beyond offering free iTunes Store lectures to its own iOS app. Speirs teaches at a private school in Scotland, and is an Apple Distinguished Educator whose schedule has lately been packed with travel and speaking engagements related to how he’s implemented a program that provides an iPad for every pupil.

iPhoneography turned out to be a strong portion of this year’s Macworld | iWorld event, with several vendors showing off apps and hardware for creating or working with images on iOS devices.

The New York Times looks behind the doors at Foxconn, the massive Chinese firm that manufactures Apple products such as the iPad, as well as products for most major electronics companies worldwide.

Final Cut Pro expert Larry Jordan walked out of Macworld | iWorld with a sense of what the future holds for video editors. While there will still be a need to cater to the high end of video production, several products at the conference demonstrate that regular people shooting with consumer gear is the model we’re likely to see dominate the vast amount of video shooting and editing.

Do you long for the days when your Mac would start with a smiling Mac logo and a row of INITs along the bottom of the screen? Or perhaps you miss watching a NeXT machine perform its initial memory scan? Pine no more for the past, because The Restart Page will transport you there. Choose from 17 Restart dialogs belonging to vintage versions of the Mac OS, Windows, NeXT's OPENSTEP, ProDOS (on the Apple IIgs), a developer build of Rhapsody, and others. Some sequences even include the old startup chimes.