News for Wednesday, 2 June 2004

Thx to Henri for sending us this picture of an ad panel in Nantes.

Now Apple just have to buy an ad on this panel, simulating this blue screen and advise people to sithc to Mac OS X.

Thanks to Gaëtan for this info.

In one of the business suburb of Shenzhen (Chinese sister of Hong-Kong), the main street was literally invaded by Apple iPod commercial (see the photo below). This street full of IT shops and stores selling high-tech products, with a miserable little Apple Center of 20m2 which is proposing a limited choice of the famous Apple music box...price being similar to those in Europe... At the opposite, in Hong-Kong, it is simply impossible to enter an computer shop without seeing some iPod models exposed, and here price are more interesting: 250€ for a 15GB iPod, 330€ for 20GB and 420€ for 40GB iPod... Finally the last info is both a good and bad news... I was visiting one of those big IT supermarkets in Hong-Kong, where you can find small IT shops selling components, accessories, libraries and softwares. Of course most of the softwares are illegal copies, with a packaging similar to the original one but with a smaller volume. But I was deeply surprised to see a whole wall reserved for Mac softwares, you could find most of the favorite Mac applications in their last versions: all Adobe, Maya, Macromedia... and everything for 2€/software or package (such as Adobe Creative Suite Standard), all in English version. The most surprising thing for me is that last October in the same shop I could find any Apple software; it was only Windows applications... so I let you conclude what you want...

Toshiba, which is already providing Apple with HDs for the current iPod models, just announced that starting from July, a 1.8" HD with a 60GB capacity will be available. Full production should start in July-August.
We can already start dreaming of a 60GB iPod...
But this will be interesting for only a small number of users/consumers who a moving/traveling with their entire music collection, but for most users, 60GB will be simply too much...except if Apple is adding some additional features to the current iPod line...such as video capacity...

NVidia, which is in addition to its famous GPUs als odevelopping motherboard chipsets and controllers, has announced during the Computex that the SATA II format is finalized and that it will bring the max data flow rate from 150MB/s to 300MB/s. We are still waiting for the HD which without a RAID system will saturate or even get close to the current data transfer rate obtained with SATA drive...

Sony has surprised everybody by announcing that it will stop selling new PDA in Europe and in the US. In short term, Sony will empty the current stocks for both market area; while it will continue to develop new products for the Japanese market.
This is a very bad news for PalmSource software division, as Sony was the main consumer, and it also means that Palm will continue to loose market shares to the PocketPC-based PDA...
If Sony will not suffer so much from the stop of its international PDA business, this action might quickly "kill" Palm...

Thanks to Bruce for the link.
If you want to use your iPod in your car, as well as possible with a perfect integration with your car sound system, Alpine has created a iPod-dedicated interface (for iPod and iPod mini)!!


Integration looks really good, even so deep that you can see the Alpine logo on the iPod display!!

While going to the Refurb Store, Pascal have seen this info (opened on Wednesday and Thursday from 11h00 am).

Something new as it was usually available only on Wednesday.
[update]
Most of the refurbed models are iMacs, all references, but also iPod 20GB and Apple displays.
Discount is in all cases at least -20%