News for Monday, 7 June 2004

Apple announced the first Airport mobile base station.

- It will plug directly on a network socket in a hotel or an entreprise to enable Wi-Fi surf.
- It will also work as a Wi-Fi bridge to extend a network range.
- It has a USB on which to plug a printer.
- AirTunes technology included:
The base station has an analogic audio line out. It is possible to send music via iTunes 4.6 from the computer to the station, which will thus play it on your Hi-Fi.
Available in July, it will cost 149 Euros VAT included.
More (in English):
http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/
To buy it on the European Apple Store:
Airport Express Base station
Cables Kit

Jean-René Cazeneuve, Apple France Director, has given an interview last week answering questions collected via internet to the 01Net web site, where you can now get the text version .
Of course no major news.
However, we can note that the price of the low-end G5 (no details if it is PMG5 or putative iMacG5) will evolve positively (down), and that the official launch of iTMS Europe will be made by Steve himself. Regarding a potential video iPod, officially Apple prefers not to investigate in that direction for the moment and concentrate on Music.

Apple just sent the following invitation to the press/info channels!

New iPods ? iTMS Europe ?
We will know soon.

[kurisu adds : this has been confirmed]

Hitachi released a 400GB hard disk. We couldn't resist cramming a SATA version of one of those bad boys in a G5 to conduct a few tests.


The formatted capacity is 372GB, which represents, in Apple terms, roughly 150'000 music tracks :)
The test (in French, translation to follow shortly):
http://www.macbidouille.com/article.php?id=161

We finally got enough feedback to sum up what to expect by overclocking with iCook.
Let's first remind you that this software only works with PPC 750 FX equipped iBooks (the ones that come with 32 MB of VRAM).
Everybody but one person seem to be able to gain at least 50MHz, and one third of the testers have succesfully pushed up to 100MHz.
A lot of 900MHz iBooks can reach 1GHz.
There is one catch to the use of iCook, though. While in use, PowerSaving is set to "maximum" performances, so the battery life is greatly reduced, and the fans seem to kick in a good deal more often.
We recommend you use this software only when you need to crunch some numbers or when you play a heavy game title.
http://www.swieskowski.net/icook/

Thank you Clément, who is writing from Canada:

I don't know if you've heard, but Coca-Cola and puretracks.com have come together for some online music offering. One has to purchase 3 bottles of Frutopia between May 1st and July 15th 2004 to be offered CA $5 worth of music download. The 3 barcodes must be sent along with your name, address, age, email address, telephone number and the signature of a legal representative for minors. Valid within Canada, Windows only.

http://www.fruitopia.com/puretracks
http://puretracks.com/splash/default.htm
Everyone and their neighbour is rushing to copy what Apple and Pepsi "pioneered". The next months will reveal if history repeats itself for Apple : competitors steal the idea, and eventually steal the market share as well.
This happened many times in the past, but the most recent example is the Wi-Fi and Centrino :(