News for Friday, 15 October 2004

MacGadget, a german website, is not known for rumors. However, the site announced without hesitation that the iBook family will be updated on tuesday.
They announce a frequency update and a significant price drop on one of the configurations.
The current line will be exactly 6 months old next Tuesday.

The creators of Retroplayer, the "turntable-like" music player that has been pretty successful among our readers, propose other funny freewares on their website.

Mosquito taking Mac is supposed to repel mosquitos by playing unpleasant frequencies (for the mosquitos, of course) through the computer speakers.
BooBooMac plays the delicate and distinguished noise of a fart each time the mouse is clicked. To be used only for weird jokes.

Today, a young man, who had been prosecuted for downloading noless than 488 movies on P2P, was discharged.
His lawer argued that no warning were present on the downnloading websites. Therefore, this person had no idea about the illegal aspect of what he was doing.
For sure, the Majors are going to appeal that decision.
Anyway, this lawer is just about to become famous!

If the wind blown by the launch of iTMS is now gone, Apple Music Store keeps going its way successfully. Since its launch, 150 millions tracks have been sold via iTMS, with an average of 4 millions/week. If the selling rate remains the same, iTMS could sell 200 millions tracks per year!!

The information which was so far a rumor is now official.
Intel has decided to cancel top-speed Pentium 4 chip, it will never reach the Mythic 4 GHz frontier. Facing technology and chip design issues, Intel has decided to stop the "GHz King" strategy which has been its way to go for now years.
The chip manufacturer is going to concentrate its strength to its dual-core project and will propose large L2 cache-based single core processor (such as P4) for next year. All chip manufacturers have been facing problem when shifting from 110/130nm to 90nm engraving process, and they had to revised their plans which were originally to increase CPU frequency thanks to thinner engraving and lower voltage. However, electron leakiness has proven to be the major issue, and the current strategy is to increase overall number of transistors/core thank to 90nm process.
Interestingly, IBM is using dual-core technology for years in its PowerX processors. The current Apple G5, aka PPC970, is a IBM dualcore-Power4 derivate.
In the future, with 65nm engraving process, we will have CPU with even more transistors and L2cache.
This information is nicely being announced the day after the European Commission has issues remarks and legal action against 5 European countries (among them France....) for having promoted Intel-based computer. This was of course indirect, but when French administration was sending request for computer offers, with minimal CPU frequency fitting Intel scale, that was putting AMD and Apple automatically out of the competition since they both have processor running at lower clock speed...even though performance were similar if not higher... from now on, one will have to speak using a computing capacity (calculating power) and no more CPU frequency business...

Barefeats conducted the tests we were all waiting for : 1920x1200
And at this resolution, the 6800 blows away the 9800 XT by being 50% faster ! A whopping 188 FPS with UT 2004 and 21 FPS with Halo. 21, that's an excelent score with this game considering it has probably been ported in AppleScript.
The 6800 Ultra has a mind boggling 35 GB/s bandwidth against a honorable 24.5 for the 9800 XT. This ratio clearly shows in the benchs

During the Digital Life expo in NYC, ATI was displaying a Powermac G5 driving a X800 card. That card was hooked up to two screens, an older 23" and a spanking new 30".
This X800 had 256MB on board, a VGA out and a DVI out, and was NOT using the space of a PCI slot for cooling.
ATI has not officially announced that card, neither its price nor its availability. But, the sooner the better, at least that'll perhaps make NVidia work a little faster.

Apple, with the unveiling of the iMac G5 has started a new technical support system where they actually send the spare parts, special tools and instructions to the customers to do the repairs themselves. Julien relates his recent experience with this new system.

Just wanted to share my experience with replacing a part myself on my iMac G5.
Last Friday, I finally took delivery of my iMac G5, I started to move things from my old mac onto my spanking new machine, but the iMac had an odd behavior, it was crashing during file copies, apps were randomly crashing... up until the moment when it simply refused to startup ! The hard drive couldn't be found.
That was Sunday. After various vain attempts to revive the spinning dude, I finally took up the phone and called AppleCare to check their opening hours... and a guy answered!!! they even work on Sundays.
I explain my problems, I am asked to do a few hardware tests, then the guy concludes my HD is dead and that he'll initiate a replacement. He asks me if I do not mind receiving the part and proceding with the exchange myself, to which I answered "no problem".
3 days later, a UPS guy is at the door with a hard drive. The package contains the disk, a screw driver, spare screws, a SATA connector and printed instructions, along with a UPS sticker to send back the failing HD.
3 minutes and we're done. My iMac is doing fine, and I'm off to put everything in the package to send it back to Apple, shipping cost being already prepaid... all in less than 10 days.
So, Way to go AppleCare !!!!

That's much better than having to send the whole machine away for weeks :)

Thanks to Drakeramore for the heads up:

It seems Apple finally decided to be a little more upfront towards switchers, and now has put up a comparison page between the Mac fairy land and PC land : punch lines : - "How does your current PC measure up to the delightfully affordable, new iMac G5?" - "Get much more from your iPod with Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther”." - "The dream begins at £549" (UK edition of the page) Well, you get the gist... it's cool, it's short, it's straight. Is Apple changing its shooting arm ? Check it out here : UK version

//kurisu adds : German version, Dutch version, Italian version, Danish version, Swedish version, Spanish version//
Timing is dead on. Our switchers forum is very active. The only shadow cast on this happy picture is the lack of available Macs in the stores...