Apple has offered some of its retail employees early access to OS X Mavericks. Genius Bar and floor staff at the company's chain of Apple Stores have been invited to install, test, and report on their experiences with Mavericks, and Bryan Chaffin argues this is good for everyone, including Apple's customers.

Apple gave the public its first preview of iOS 7 last week during its annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. A beta version just for iOS developers was released the same day, and it found its way to many people outside of that group who promptly started complaining about stability issues, non-functioning features, poor battery life, interface problems, broken third-party apps, and more. Of course iOS 7 has problems; it's beta software.

Dave Peck, Peter Sagerson and Nick Robinson were all doing freelance work in Seattle. They would gather at one of the many coffee shops there, getting caffeinated and doing their work. Then one day, Dave Peck realized they were using all these open wireless networks, completely non-secure, and doing sensitive client work. Then they realized they needed one of those VPN clients. Except, they were all so bad.  The rest is history.

In many endeavors these days, outsiders have a louder voice than the people doing the hard work. It's so bad that scientists have to take classes on public speaking.  The same goes for Apple. The employeees inside of Apple, designing and selling great products that are snapped up immediately, are under a barrage of criticism by outsiders who boast loudly. John Martellaro explains some of the reactions to WWDC's Keynote.

Need to tone up? You're in luck. Vern Seward points out three free apps that should help in this week's Free on iTunes. FitStar, Tabata+ Lite, and Sleep Studio.

This is too fun: Amazon Japan sells a trash can (Google translation) that looks a lot like Apple's brand spankin' new Mac Pro. Some may find that fitting since there was a barrage of "it looks like a trash can" comments when Apple announced the device on Monday.

Looking at Apple's new iOS it seems they haven't even decided for themselves what things should look like. Too much more delay here is bad for third-party developers and, therefore, bad for us. See what Dave Hamilton found.

Like to text? Vern Seward point out 3 iOS apps that just might enhance your texting experience in this week's Free On iTunes. MessagEase, Fleksy, and Glyph-O-Rama.

Bryan Chaffin has been thinking about Apple CEO Tim Cook and the company's design guru, Sir Jonathan Ive. It started when Sir Jony was put in charge of the look and feel of iOS 7. As more rumors about the iOS makeover began to come out, he became convinced: working with the software designers is one of many steps in Tim Cook training him to takeover Apple some day.

There are varying perspectives on what the next Mac Pro should be like.  But everyone seems to agree that it should look beautiful, be insanely fast, have stupendus graphics power, be customer upgradeable to ridiculous amounts of RAM, boot from an SSD and be cooled by liquid helium if necessary in order to run rings around any everyday iMac. A WWDC announcement would stun and stagger us.