News for Thursday, 15 April 2004

Pym has found on the US Apple web site the following info:

Those students are quite lucky to have PowerBook G5!
http://www.apple.com/education/
[update]
The same info can be found on this page:
http://www.apple.com/fi/software/pro/audio/

[update] For those who still have doubt that Apple is reading macbidouille.com carefully, hereafter is the proof:
Both web pages have been corrected within the 2 hours after we have published that news!!
PS: Hi Steve :)

Yesterday, Apple published its financial results for the last quarter.
It seems all is fine with a 1.91 billion $ income, up 29% compared to last year, and a threefold increase in profit, at 46 million $.
But those numbers are hidding a revolution: Apple sold 749000 Mac (+ 5%) and 807000 iPod (+900%!).
Macs are threfore not anymore the product that Apple sells the most... it's too early to tell whether it's a good or bad thing for us Mac users...
Let's just note that a +5% rise in Mac sales is always good news, after years of slow decline.

Although the Geforce 6800 Ultra based cards won't be out until a few more weeks, a number of sites had the opportunity to test those products.

All test results sing the same tune : this card slaughters the old reference, namely the Radeon 9800 XT.
The performance gap is so drastic, that the Radeon is totally out of the picture now. ATI is going to need some serious stuff in its next range of graphic chips.
Tests/Benchmarks of the 6800 in English :
- On Firingsquad
- On Tomshardware
And for the brave, some more tests in French :
- On Clubic
- On Hardware.fr

You already cleaned your keyboard, now what about the mouse, you might ask ? Well, André Sterpin shows you how to clean the little round Apple USB mouse. (in French, but hey, with the picture it is easy to figure it out ;) )
56k users version (100 Kb)
http://www.sterpin.net/sourisusbp.htm
Broadband users version (340 Kb)
http://www.sterpin.net/sourisusb.htm

According to Games Radar, the xBox 2 could eventually be connected to an external harddrive via a proprietary interface. This "drive" might as well be used for storing and listening to MP3/WMA in a standalone fashion. To top it all, it should cost a mere $100. The xBox not being released before a while, Apple has all the time it needs to cook up something in response.

XPostFacto was bumped up to 3.0a17.
This release enables the installation of Panther on the first G3 Powerbooks. Don't blindly jump on it though, for now the best screen palette is 256 colors (8 bit). But soon enough this should be increased to "thousands of colors".
XPostFacto 3.0a17

HardOCP published this table that *should* be corresponding to the street prices and specs of the Radeon X800 cards.

The X800 Pro should be rapidly released starting April 26th, which leaves us the hope of seing those babies in a G5 relatively soon.

There you go, the new eMacs are finally available through all European Apple Stores :-)