For its second fiscal quarter of 2014, Apple has once again reported record sales and revenues, beating analyst expectations and thrilling investors with a stock split, bigger dividends, and more stock buybacks.

Apple has been filing new trademark applications worldwide to broaden its trademark to include Class 14 items — “precious metals and their alloys and goods in precious metals or coated therewith, not included in other classes; jewelry, precious stones; horological and chronometric instruments” — reports Eric Slivka of MacRumors. The new filings add fuel to the iWatch rumor fire, but it should be noted that some of Apple’s trademarks had already included Class 14 items. This could just be an attempt by the company to tidy its trademarks.

Apple is no longer restricting Mac OS X betas to paying developers. Anyone with an Apple ID (which is, let’s face it, essentially every Apple user at this point) can now sign up for the OS X Beta Seed Program to test unreleased versions of the operating system. You have to agree to Apple’s OS X Beta Seed and Confidentiality Agreement and install the Beta Access Utility to view betas in the Mac App Store. After WWDC, we’ll see if this applies to major releases of OS X, or just minor updates.

Apple has released iOS 7.1.1 with a handful of bug and security fixes.

Global Delight’s Boom promises to turn your Mac’s speakers up to 11. Josh Centers takes a look at the utility and finds an unexpected use for it.

Gizmodo ran a side-by-side test of Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s new Cortana virtual assistants. The results were neck and neck, with each displaying its own quirks, but the short video is fun to watch.

TidBITS Managing Editor and “Take Control of Apple TV” author Josh Centers was invited to speak to the Chicago-area user group The Northwest of Us. In this in-depth recorded session, Josh discussed some reasons why Apple users should consider the Apple TV, took audience questions, and speculated about the future of Apple TV.

Our own Jeff Carlson has written a piece for 500px explaining how to use your iPad to up your photography game. No, not by taking photos with its built-in camera, but by using the iPad to preview, edit, sort, and share photos, and even to control your camera remotely.

Hardware maker LaCie, best known for its Mac-centric hard drives and accessories, has acknowledged that a security breach in its online store exposed customer credit card numbers and contact information for much of the past year. Seagate, which now owns LaCie, denied any problems until 14 April 2014, when it confirmed to security journalist Brian Krebs that an attacker had gained access to “name, address, email address, payment card number and card expiration date for transactions made between March 27, 2013 and March 10, 2014.” If you ordered from LaCie during that time, watch for spurious charges on your credit card bill.

Bradley Chambers, Director of IT for the Brainerd Baptist School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has a number of trenchant suggestions for ways Apple could improve iOS for education, including a way to deploy in-app purchases in MDM or Apple Configurator, the option to redistribute iBooks Store textbooks between classes, increasing the default storage space in future devices, and an iCloud email service for schools.

Want to edit Office documents on your iPad, but don’t need to use five computers, as Office 365 Home Premium allows? For $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year, Microsoft will now sell you Office 365 Personal, which lets you edit Office documents on one Mac or PC and one tablet, and offers 20 GB of extra OneDrive storage. Note that you can buy a year of Office 365 Home Premium at Amazon for roughly $30 off the $99.99 list price, so perhaps Amazon will soon offer an even better deal on Office 365 Personal as well.