News for Tuesday, 26 October 2004

With the new iPods, iTunes evolves and is now available in version 4.7. This update features iPod Photo management, automatic suppression of a song present twice in your library, and the "Artists Alerts" which will notify you when songs of your favorite artists are being added to iTMS.
So, you will have to use iTunes to synchronize your pictures with your iPod Photo, and not iPhoto. A bit weird...
www.apple.com/itunes

Apple Store is now having a specific section dedicated to Apple digital music player iPod, the iPod Store. You will find 4 types of iPod, and all accessories organized depending on the usage: "in your car", "on the go", "in your home", and "on your Mac+PC".
As well as for students or large account/business, "iPod-buyers" are now perfectly defined and separated from standard Apple computer consumers.

Apple is proposing a U2 Special Edition of its bestselling product: iPod. It is a 20GB iPod dressed in Black, featuring a deep-red click-wheel, and in addition laser-engraved signatures of each band member adorn the back of iPod. Its price: 399 euros (US$349); US$50 more expensive than a standard 20GB iPod, but it includes a dock station as well as US$50 off The Complete U2 songs available from iTMS; and it has its own specific design :)
One can expect to see such iPod Special Edition featuring other artists/bands in a near future.
Available from mid-November from Apple Store.

The rumorediPod Photo is officially announced! With its new "high definition" display - 220x176 - you can store 25 000 photos beside your music library. You can browse through your pictures with the click-wheel, and launch a slideshow with music. The iPod Photo includes a TV output, and its battery lifespan is enhanced up to up to 15 hours of continuous music; up to 5 hours of continuous slideshows with music. The remote device is as for its brother not included.

Capacity: 40 or 60 GB for a price of569 or 679,01 euros, respectively (499 and 599 US$).
Specs: 182 g et 104 x 61 x 19 mm, delivered with its dock station. 5cm 65000 color LCD display.
Available from Apple Store

A table comparing all iPods is available HERE.

When you open iTunes and connect to iTMS, this is now what you can see:

Disappointing to still have the Swiss excluded, but definitely iTMS is now accessible to most "old" European countries!
EU is now composed of 25 countries, now 12 of them can access iTMS. a real progress, but still 13 to go; in addition outside EU, Canada and Australia are still missing.

We know that Apple asked resellers to push sales of Dual 2 GHz G5s to those who'd ordered 2.5. That's what the FNAC does as the following message sent to one of our readers states:

Dear client,
we regret to inform you that for now Apple will not be in capacity to deliver the PowerMac G5 you've ordered on September 9th. Apple unveiled a technical issue with their 2.5Ghz processors and are currently trying to solve it. That's the reason why Apple hasn't been able to communicate us a delivery schedule for this model. Yet the 2Ghz model is currently available in very limited quantities under 3 to 4 days. If you wish to switch to this other product please contact us ASAP.

Apple adds a snob effect to computer business. The best is to own a machine that you can get nowhere. For antiquity shops those are often the oldest pieces. For the Mac, those are the most recent.

Opener, aka Renepo-A, has just appeared. TheRegister summarizes the situation : It's a shell script that must be installed on a Mac running OS X in order to work. It erases some commands of the Terminal and steals passwords, in copying the keys typed on the keyboard. It doesn't spread (it can't exploit a security hole to move from one Mac to the other, and must be manually installed on the target), what makes it more a Trojan than a Virus. It seems it allows an access to the machine thanks to VNC.
MacInTouch has more details about this script.
The risk of being infected by this piece of software is anyhow very low, since it needs either somebody with a physical access to your Mac, or someone able to make you execute it with administrator's right (i.e. to make you launch a program then type your password), or install it by yourself.

Yesterday we were reporting about a curious DVD burner, the Pioneer 117, installed in new PMG5. Some of our readers in our reader were right!, Apple has modified (curbed) a Pioneer DVR-108 to make it working as a 107. CriCri has taken picture for us of this DVD burner.

There is not reference from Pioneer catalog for such model, DVR-108AA. So there is quite good chance that this burner is in fact a DVR-108A; so flashing it with the proper firmware should allow it to work at full capacity. Do not try anything yet, we are collecting additional data.

After receiving 5 times the official press release for this software, we have decided to make a news out of it.
FAST DVD COPY is now available in version 3. It is supposed to be able to duplicate any CD, video DVD and PlayStation discs. Update from version 1 and 2 is free. An evaluation version is available on their website.
http://www.fastdvdcopy.com
PS: Thanks to report your test in our forum (try your best French ;) ).

According to Clubic, Apple would really like to implement Light Scribe technology for the Mac.

This technology allows you to burn on a disk a gray-scaled picture. It requires specific burners and media.
This technology is developed by HP, which is quite close to Apple since they are selling a licensed iPod.
More info regarding Light Scribe:
- January, 15th 2004
- March, 30th 2004
- July, 2nd 2004

Thanks to Julien for this info:

I am a French student in Chicago and while passing by the local AppleStore, I have seen that they were selling off Belkin "media reader". Located in the center of the AppleStore, below the famous stairs, there is a table on which are installed discounted Apple products (including refurbished ones), and today there were 13 Media Reader Boxes...

We will not elaborate any hypothesis, from a new Media reader to a new product which will not require this Belkin's product anymore; do not expect any comments from us.