Is Apple still leading the Macintosh industry, or has the popularity of the Mac and the iPhone created a situation where independent developers can do their own thing and let Apple focus on consumer electronics and online entertainment content sales, along with maintaining the basic Mac and iPhone platforms?

TidBITS Senior Editor Tonya Engst is shocked to have to wait in line for the bathroom at Macworld Expo. Seemingly many more women made the trek to the show this year.

This week's discussions at TidBITS Talk deal with backing up large databases using Time Machine, the ongoing question of how much Intuit hates its customers, Apple's new Mac Pro release right before Macworld Expo, and a number of glitches that readers have encountered (and solved).

When you're buying a hardware add-on for your Mac, features and price are key factors, but what about warranty? If your accessory fails, will the manufacturer replace it? We explore what consumers need to know about the differences from one manufacturer's warranty to the next - looking not just at the number of years you're covered, but the number of days, or weeks, you might have to wait for service.

There's plenty to talk about following our holiday hiatus. Readers discuss bugs ranging from Microsoft Office to Automator under Leopard, recovering a drive that's been accidentally erased by Disk Utility, and whether Twitter is useful or not. At the same time, people weigh in with suggestions of books for new Mac users and digital voice recorders.

After three years, Apple and Think Secret agree to a settlement in Apple's long-running suit to compel Think Secret to reveal sources that leaked Apple trade secrets. But does anyone actually win?

This week's discussions are all over the Mac map, ranging from streaming audio through an AirPort Express and potential bugs in Leopard and Tiger to readers' impressions of the iPod touch and how to store data on it.

Camera manufacturers make a big deal about how many megapixels their cameras have, but does it really matter? Or ought we be looking at other aspects of the camera's image sensor?

An ambitious new project from Google takes aim at Wikipedia, but at least as it has been described so far, it suffers from numerous conceptual problems and makes Google seem more like Microsoft than ever before.

Readers continue to poke at Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, posting questions about Spaces, Back to My Mac, the installation process, and the firewall. In other discussions, we talk about viewing office documents on the iPhone, serving a music library from an iPod photo, and the resolution of eyeglass-style video devices like the Myvu Personal Media Viewer.

It's not too late to buy holiday gifts for your favorite Mac-using friends and family members! Based on last week's gift guide survey, we've compiled a best-of collection of gift ideas.

We took a week off from publishing the TidBITS email issue, but that didn't stop the fascinating discussions in TidBITS Talk. See what the community is buzzing about!

If you hate receiving unnecessary and overly frequent catalogs as much as Adam does, check out Catalog Choice, a new free service aimed helping reduce the 19 billion catalogs thrown at us each year.

FileMaker Inc. has released Bento, claiming it's "the personal database that's as easy to use as the Mac." Database consultant Jeff Porten takes the preview release for a spin and finds Bento conceptually interesting but unwilling to stray far enough from the FileMaker fold.

This week's discussions continue to revolve around Leopard, as well as jamming cellphones, IMAP email access using Gmail, the popularity of Google compared to other search services, and the difference in tactile response on Apple laptops.