2007 been a successful year for Apple. From the iPhone to OS X Leopard to iTunes Apple left its mark.

So what are the 2007 biggest stories for Apple? Scrutinizing all the Apple contributions in Tech world, here are the Top 7 Apple Stories of 2007. 

7. Apple Refreshes The iPod Line

Apple introduced a new line of iPods in September. These included the Touch, which is sort of like an iPhone without the phone bits, as well as upgraded versions of the iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano.

Like the iPhone, the Touch has a touchscreen, Wi-Fi access, built-in Web browser, and music and video player. But you can't use the Touch for phone calls. The Touch is priced starting at $299 for an 8 Gbyte version.

The iPod Nano got new hardware and a software upgrade. The video iPod got the same, and also a new name: the iPod Classic. 

6. Microsoft Postpones Office Release

Microsoft pushed back the release date for Office, which had been expected last year, to mid-January. Microsoft said it needed more time to work on quality issues.

Who's going to get hurt most by the delay? Microsoft, probably.

A decade ago, Bill Gates very nearly saved Apple from going out of business. His pledge that Microsoft would continue to support Office on the Mac was just about as important as the hefty cash infusion Microsoft gave Apple. But now, users are less dependent on Microsoft Office, turning to alternatives such as Apple's iWork, Google Docs, and Zoho's office suite.

Meanwhile, Office on the Mac is important to Microsoft; the software's revenue is growing much faster than Office on Windows.

Microsoft finished Office 2008 for the Mac in December and said it's on track to deliver the product to consumers in January.

5. New iMacs, iWork, And iLife Kick Microsoft Where It Hurts

Apple's announcement last summer of new iMacs and desktop productivity software delivered a kick to Microsoft where it hurts.

Apple introduced redesigned aluminum-and-glass iMacs, and new versions of its iLife and iWork software suites. The new iMacs come in with 20-inch models, priced at $1,199 and $1,400, and 24-inch models, priced at $1,799, with faster chips and more storage -- up to 1 Tbyte -- than previous models.

iLife '08, priced at $79, includes iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, and Garageband. The iPhoto and iMovie applications saw the most significant changes. iPhoto received user interface changes designed to make it easier to organize and find images in libraries with thousands of pictures.

iMovie was optimized for producing Web-based videos a couple of minutes long, a change that proved controversial among professional video bloggers using iMovie '08's predecessor as a sophisticated tool for putting together longer and more complicated videos.

Apple added Numbers, a spreadsheet application, to its iWork office suite, making it more attractive than before as an alternative to Microsoft Office. iWork already included the Pages word processor and Keynote presentation program.

4. Macs Gets Bitten By Bugs And Viruses

Microsoft is often accused of copying features from Apple, but in this case, some of the ripping-off went the other way, as Macs were subjected to Trojan horses and security flaws in its software.

Mac security vendor Intego warned users that malicious Trojan software capable of compromising Macs was found on several porn sites. The Trojan, OS.XRSPlug.A is one of the few Mac exploits ever found in the wild.

Jon Gruber, author of the acerbic Mac blog Daring Fireball, said the threat isn't such a big deal. In a post headlined with not-safe-for-work language, he wrote: "To get hit by it, you must (a) be the sort of moron who downloads 'video codecs' from porno sites; (b) mount the disk image and launch the installer; and (c) grant the installer administrator privileges to install whatever it wants, wherever it wants on your system. No system can prevent that."

Gruber added: "If anything, the fact that you have to manually install the software and supply your administrator password is a sign that Mac OS X security works."

An InformationWeek reader named bhuot agreed: "You can't protect from a user deliberately installing a trojan Most Mac users still use no security software and have no problems with malware."

Also, an old Apple Mail bug, squashed in Tiger, returned to life in Leopard. The bug, which was fixed in 2006, allows an attacker to create an e-mail attachment that appears to be a benign file (such as a JPEG image) but that in fact executes malicious code when it's clicked on, without the warning dialogue that should be present.
 

3. Leopard Pounces

Apple introduced the first upgrade of Mac OS X 10 in two years last October. Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, features a graphical, automated backup utility called Time Machine, as well as upgrades to mail, iChat, and user interface improvements. All told, Apple boasted it had 300 new features in Leopard.

No single feature was a standout blockbuster, but everybody has their favorites, and Apple's customers were mostly happy. The two most popular new features are probably Time Machine backup software and Quick Look and Cover Flow for file browsing.

Time Machine automatically works as soon as you plug in an external disk drive. It copies everything from your hard drive to the new drive, and indexes the copy so you can quickly roll back individual files, folders, or your entire computer to an earlier state. Time Machine gives you a slick, 3D user interface for navigating your backups. It integrates with many applications, too, so you can, for example, find an old, deleted mail message from within Mail.

Quick Look and Cover Flow are designed to allow you to quickly navigate through documents in Finder and locate just the image, video, PDF, or other document that you're looking for. With Quick Look, you click on a file, tap the space bar, and you can see the contents of the file without opening the application needed to fully read it. Cover Flow is a means of browsing quickly through the contents of whole folders.

Mail lets you embed e-mail messages in other applications, such as a to-do reminder or an iCal appointment. This is my single favorite Leopard feature; I use it many times every day. Mail also adds support for RSS and improved search. (And by "improved," I mean "it works now." Search in Tiger Mail was awful.)

Leopard also improved searching in Spotlight to make it easier to find documents on your desktop.

Leopard also has a new, semi-transparent Dock, with new ways of organizing files. I don't have strong feelings about the new Dock, but many Apple fans just hate, hate, hate it. For example, Daring Fireball writes that the Dock is "so bad that one wonders how anyone at Apple can think it's a good idea." The Mac blog TidBITS included the Dock on its list of six things it hates about Leopard. Both blogs provide tips for modifying the appearance of the Dock.

Another element of Leopard that proved unpopular: The Blue Screen of Death. Some users reported their systems froze up and displayed an error message on a blue screen when upgrading from Tiger to Leopard. Some users blamed the problem on old versions of a third-party user interface modification program called APE, created by developer Unsanity. Apple posted a fix.

Leopard users were hit with a "green screen of death" bug in December. How many deadly shades of the rainbow will Mac users be made to suffer?
 

2. Apple Broadens iTunes Portfolio, Quarrels With Media Companies

2007 closed with Apple's iTunes business going strong, but facing several challenges that could make things uncomfortable in the future.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted an open letter on Apple's Web site in February calling on major record labels to drop requirements for digital rights management technology on music. Jobs said DRM hurts consumers and fails to stop music piracy.

It was a bold statement, considering that Apple's own DRM technology, FairPlay, is important to the company's business success in online music. FairPlay was developed to stop music piracy, but it also has the effect of tying iTunes media to iPods; FairPlay-protected music won't play on other vendors' portable media players. While users can convert FairPlay music to MP3s, the process is inconvenient and time-consuming, making it painful for consumers to switch from iPods to other vendors' media players.

iTunes is to digital music what Windows is to the desktop operating system. Apple has a 90% share of the downloadable music market, according to a report from Piper Jaffray.

Apple followed up on Jobs' announcement by launching in May iTunes Plus for DRM-free music tracks, for $1.29 per song, which is $0.30 higher than the price of music including DRM. The service launched with music from EMI, including singles and albums from Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Frank Sinatra, Joss Stone, Pink Floyd, John Coltrane, and more than a dozen Paul McCartney solo albums. At about the same time, Apple said it will not license FairPlay DRM to other vendors.

Apple dropped the price on iTunes Plus music to $0.99 in October, and expanded the catalog to include music by indie labels.

And Apple launched the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store in the fall, to allow consumers to purchase music wirelessly through their iPod Touch or iPhone.

Meanwhile, music and movie distributors and TV networks, which supply iTunes with paid content, are rebelling against Apple's market control. NBC and Universal declined to renew their contracts with iTunes. Apple cancelled NBC's fall line-up on iTunes. Universal said it would sell music on iTunes at will.

And iTunes faced legal challenges. A Florida man filed a class-action suit charging Apple with illegal monopolistic practices over tying iPods to the iTunes Music Store. The lawsuit appears to be based on false premises that consumers "cannot transfer content purchased from iTunes to a non-iPod digital music player, nor can they download digital content from other online vendors to their iPods," according to AppleInsider.com. In fact, consumers can burn their iTunes FairPlay content to MP3s on CDs, and then transfer them to any other device that supports MP3s; it's clumsy for large volumes of music, but it works. Likewise, the iPod can play any music in MP3 format, such as music ripped from CDs or downloaded from the Amazon.com music store.

1. Apple Unveils iPhone, Users' Brains Explode From Sheer Joy

The introduction of the iPhone was the top Apple event for 2007. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco on Jan. 9. Apple fans oohed and aahed over its thin, black body and multitouch interface, which would allow users to navigate applications with more than one finger, allowing for a richer user interface. They also loved the visual voicemail feature, which automatically switches the display from portrait to landscape mode when you switch the phone to one side.

Apple fans raved about the device. Jack Azout, owner of Prescient Solutions, an IT consulting firm in Miami, was at the introduction and was ready to throw out his BlackBerry Pearl on the spot. "I guess I'll use this until June," Azout told InformationWeek, while looking down at his BlackBerry. "It's just that the iPhone does things a whole lot better and does them with elegance and style, and it's fun to use."

Late night talk show host Craig Ferguson said the iPhone is "the biggest technological development since curly fries."