News for Wednesday, 7 July 2004

XLR8Yourmac has published a large comparison test of ZIF-socket based upgrade cards. Those cards are compatible with G3 Beige and/or G3 Blue/White (and also G4 PCI).
This test is interesting because it gives the answer to quite frequently asked question: Is it better to take a "fast" G3-based card, or a "slow" G4-based one?
XLR8Yourmac

Apple had already announced it, the JavaScript engine for Safari has been completely revised. So we wanted to check if JavaScript engine in Safari was really improved since it was noticeably slower than with ant other browser. A developer was nice enough to run BenchJS test and gave us the results, which are meeting our expectations!
Results for a Titanium G4 1GHz, full processor performance settings.
- FireFox 0.9.1 : 48,4
- Opéra 7.5.2 : 15,8
- Safari 2.0 : 11,25
To compare hereafter are the results obtained with a AluBook 17" 1.33GHz:
- FireFox 0.9.1 : 45,8
- Opéra 7.5.2 : 11,54
- Safari 1.2.2 : 76,1
As you can see, Safari 2.0, even in its beta version, is much faster under tiger than under Panther, and is even leading the competition for the JavaScript engine performance for the currently available MacOSX browsers.

The Store just re-opened and we can finally find iPod Minis at a perfectly affordable price : 279€ in France (with 20€ MP3 tax), 259€ in Germany, 269€ in the rest of Europe and £179 in UK, when we could've thought it would be 299€.
Availability is set to July 24th for the moment. But hurry up, as the orders come in this date will crawl further and further away... unless Applehas finally resolved its hard drive supply problems...

Apple Store UK
Apple Store Germany
Apple Store Netherlands

The Apple Store does not sell 2x DVD-Rs anymore. Only 4x and 8x are listed in the catalogue.
Safety concerns however have led Pioneer to limit the 2x writers in the past (models 103 and 104) so that these were not able to write faster than 1x on 4x medias: under some specific conditions, the drive could halt and the 4x medias could catch fire.
Which means all owners of 103 and 104 will very soon not be able to write any faster than 1x, since adequate 2x medias are desapearing, replaced by models with higher writing speed specifications.
To date, there is only one solution to overcome this limitation, but it is far from perfect: using a modified firmware. The risk to end up with a non functional drive is real. However, we have never recieved such information, exept from Pioneer.

Quite saddly, the Refurb Store is absolutely empty in France today. Apple has probably sold out the remaining stocks of displays. Those who have been hoping for some cheap iMac, now that the range has been officialy declared obsolete, are certainly the most disapointed.

Almost all european Apple Stores have again closed, as well as the Singapur Store, the Hong-Kong Store and the Japan Store.
Well, we maybe should start to anounce the stores opening again, instead of closing times.

In an attempt to reduce piracy levels, BMG Germany came up with a rather peculiar idea.
CDs are going to be sold for €9,99. These CDs will have the bare minimum packaging, no cover, no inlay.
Coming to that, people are better off buying on the iTMS and print the cover art from within iTunes...
[translator adds : wonder if they will care enough to print something on the cd itself. Otherwise it's going to be difficult to know which is which... say... a Nsync CD with a Britney CD... oh wait, that's a bad example...]