News for Wednesday, 22 September 2004

Thanks to Hugo for the info
According to the English Canadian newspaper, The Gazette, le largest Mac reseller in Montreal, B.Mac, will stop operations by the end of October. apple Canada did not comment on that.
Everybody knowing difficulties faced by Apple resellers all over the world will not be surprised by this news; we even might see more in the coming month.

A very interesting article over at Wired discusses Microsoft Japan's plans to port and translate (in Japanese) more games on the Mac platform. With the rumors around the next XBox machine from the software giant sporting G5 like CPUs, would that be the start of something bigger ?
Conspiracy theorists, put your tinfoil hats on...

We are routinely giving some news from the LCD manufacturers business. It does not really improve. In order to decrease the final price while maintaining their profit margins, LCD manufacturers have put some pressure on their electronic component suppliers requesting some price cuts. The latter have agreed to do some effort, but till a certain level.
In addition to the LCD slab, a display is made of many electronic components manufactured by specialized companies. Some of the most important ones, are those used for color filtering and back light. Except if there is a huge request from consumers, LCD manufacturers may experience lower than expected sales in month ahead.

We have had a few people reporting back to us about the excessive noise of the 80GB HD of the iMac G5. Apart from seeking noises, it emits a harsh sound, a bit like an unbalanced fan rattling.
Of course we won't draw any conclusion basis 6 or 7 reports, but if you experience similar issues, don't hesitate to drop us a line.

ATI just released its new mid-range PCI-express GPU, aka X700. This card is roughly as performant as a Radeon 9800 XT. Even though it is not yet available on Mac, one can expect to see it quickly, without taking much risk, for the next PMG5 revision.

While waiting for its introduction for the Mac world, hereafter are linked to different tests performed by PC web sites.
-in French:
Hardware.fr
Présence PC
Clubic
-In English
Tom's Hardware
Hard OCP

PC Mag has tested the iMacG5. The recently released Apple's computer has successfully passed the exam, and obtained 5 out of 5 stars award; which is quite a good news for a Pc-oriented website. The only remarks regarding the iMacG5 were:
- non-upgradeable graphic cards
- weak audio speaker
and we can only agree on those points.

Source : PC Inpact (in French)

Toshiba announced that its next dvd recorder, the SD-R5372, will be the first to burn DVD+R9 in 5x, against 4x, currently standard among its competitors.
Interesting thing to note is that even though this drive can burn DVD+R in 16x, the DVD-R medias will top at a surprising 12x.

According to Apple Insider, Microsoft has temporarily assigned a part of its xBox team to the VPC project. The idea is to deliver native video card support asap.
As always, this info is to be taken with a (large) pinch of salt.
Apparently, owners of a recent ATI card would end up with a virtual 32 MB Radeon and the owners of a NVidia card would get a 32MB Geforce 3.
This enhancement is sooner or later going to be needed, since the newer Avalon API of Windows (which will be retrofitted to XP and available as an add-on to Longhorn) will require 3D acceleration, in the same fashion as Quartz Extreme.

Fred seems to have found a way to check the memory bus width :

I think I have something straightforward :
in a terminal window:
ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n memory -S | grep "ram-bus-width"
on an iMac G5 with two identical RAM sticks, it returns :
"ram-bus-width"= <00000080>
Of course this value is in hex, which translates into 128
I didn't have the opportunity to test a different configuration, but I would be quite surprised to see anything else than :
"ram-bus-width"= <00000040>

If you feel like doing the test, be sure to drop us a line with your results. If this turns out to be an accurate check, we'll build a small app to automate this.

Benamad has taken delivery of his spanking new iMac G5 17" 1.8 GHz. He sent us this xBench performed under "maximum performance" energy setting and with 2 identical Ram sticks.

Take those benches with a grain of salt, though... but on first look, the CPU and HD tests are quite disappointing compared to a 1.5Ghz Powerbook G4 17".

Whether it is too early to really have a clear picture on the CPU tests, the HD that Apple chose seems to be quite sluggish.

MP3.com has published an interesting recap of the various types of scrollwheels on the 4 different generations of iPod.

The ever evolving scroll wheel is one of the bigger "pros" that make iPods such a success.