While Apple's 15" MacBook Pro was the first consumer notebook to gain a Retina-level display nearly a year ago, it is no longer the only such offering, as Google's Chromebook Pixel with its 12.85" 2560x1700 display and Toshiba's Kirabook with a 2560x1440 220 PPI display have joined the market in recent months. Seeking to raise the ante on Retina displays, Samsung and Sharp have both introduced new high-resolution displays in the past week, targeting notebooks and ultrabooks with the latest technology.

As noted by AppleInsider , MacBook Air supplies are beginning to dry up as Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference approaches. Currently, the 13.3-inch 256GB 1.8Ghz MacBook Air is out of stock at Amazon.com, with a listed one to two month waiting period.

Corning yesterday announced ( via Engadget ) the launch of its latest glass substrate for LCD and OLED displays, Lotus XT Glass .

The CW has struck a deal that will bring the network's content to the Apple TV, reports Deadline . At the company's annual Upfront Presentation in New York today, CW president Mark Pedowitz announced that the CW's TV Now applications, which are currently available on Xbox 360 and Windows 8, will be coming to the Apple TV as well.

Apple has released an update to its iTunes music and media application, bringing it to version 11.0.3. The update updates the compact MiniPlayer, adding album artwork and a progress bar, as well as better support for multi-disc albums and large iTunes libraries. This version of iTunes comes with several new features and improvements, including: - New MiniPlayer .

Reuters is reporting that Apple has responded to the Justice Department's accusations that the company colluded with publishers to increase e-book pricing, saying that it negotiated with the publishers separately and reached different agreements with each. But Apple said the publishers had decided, independent of Apple, to eliminate discounts on wholesale book prices of e-books, to sell lucrative hardcover books first to bookstores in a practice called windowing and to take other measures to push Amazon to raise prices. In a court filing dated April 26 but released on Tuesday, Apple said it had approached publishers to create an online bookstore that would eventually become the iBookstore and had demanded a 30 percent commission, that publishers would not undercut prices paid to Apple, and that "windowing" be scrapped

CIO reports on an Interop keynote presentation yesterday by PayPal chief information security officer Michael Barrett in which he discussed the future of account security and suggested that passwords and PINs will soon be a thing of the past. Barrett currently serves as president of the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance that is seeking alternatives to these traditional security methods. The FIDO Alliance protocol allows users a choice of authentication method while shifting control to providers who can make authentication user-transparent and limit the risk of fraud

According to a new report from Japanese newspaper Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun [ Google Translation ] (via AppleInsider) Sharp, one of Apple's primary display partners, will begin manufacturing LCD panels for the iPhone 5S beginning in June at its Kameyama Plant No. 1 in Japan. The site notes that Apple also sent orders to both Japan Display and LG Display, with mass production already under way, which confirms a report last month from The Wall Street Journal that suggested iPhone 5S production would begin in the second quarter

A German court has ruled that eight provisions in Apple's privacy policy are inapplicable because they run afoul of German consumer protection laws , reports Bloomberg .

AllThingsD shares details on a new report from J.P. Morgan analysts Gokul Hariharan and Mark Moskowitz, who unsurprisingly argue that Apple's rumored lower-cost iPhone will still be a "mid-end" device rather than competing against the true low end of the smartphone market. The analysts point to Apple's previous introductions of the iPod nano and iPad mini as cheaper versions of their parent products that were still significantly more expensive than low-end competitors due to Apple's refusal to sacrifice quality for the sake of price