Monday October 10, 2005

- Uncap the iPod nano - Lionel - 11:05:26

First of all, we'll remind you that the prolungated use of a MP3 player at a high sound volume damages your hearing IRREMEDIABLY ! (see THIS NEWS ITEM). However, and with no intention of hurting yourself, in some cases the bridling of the iPod at 100 dB might be a problem, for instance to use a big Sennheiser device.
So to come to what this news is about, GoPod reached version 1.3.
http://gopod.free-go.net/
Apart from the iPod Shuffle, every (recent) iPods are now compatible with this soft, including the nano.

[translation by Kalomir]

- Apple weighs over Flash memory price - Lionel - 11:00:21

Source : Digitimes

To ensure their supplies of NAND flash memory for the iPod nano, Apple bought Samsung 40% of their overall production volume.
This very important draw on those components weighs over the flash memory prices, that increase in quite a worrying way.
The nano should thus be part of a future increase of prices for other devices such as USB keys, or camera memories for instance.
For Apple, this collateral damage at least has one advantage, it will increase the distance with competitors on the flash memory MP3 player market, who are eager to upgrade their capacities in keeping to that of the nano.
To give it a final touch, Macworld lets us know that the South Corean government decided to investigate about the agreement betwenn Apple and Samsung. It is a consequence of the competitors complaint about an agreement that allowed Apple to buy their flash memory quite under market prices.

[translation by Kalomir]

- MacIntel : examples of future models - Lionel - 09:06:17

We are often hearing about what could be potentially lost with MacIntels transitions, without serious information regarding what could be gained with such CPU migration.
That's the reason why we have decided to release 2 screenshots sent to us by an anonymous source.
We do not think that this info will hurt Apple, since it simply demonstrates the huge potential offered to mac users by the future MacIntels.




Without giving much details, those captures shows MacOSX x86 running on a 4 physical CPU-based MacIntel with Hyperthreading enable. One can clearly see 4 physical processors recognized while 8 logical processors are recorded by the CPU monitor.
So MacOSX can really manage without problem any MacIntel based on either physical or logical processors.

[translation by Eric]