News for Thursday, 17 March 2005

... amazing but true. This is what is currently offered by SXSW: the entire SXSW 2005 Music Festival (Austin, Texas) in an iPod format.
If you follow the link below, you can get the FEST4POD, the Music Festival Schedule, and the BitTorrent link to download all music files, around 750 tracks, for a total of 2.6GB>
http://2005.sxsw.com/geekout/fest4pod/

Apple has officially acknowledged the trackpad problem experienced by many owners of the last PowerBook models. In this TechNote, it is mentioned that one can reset the trackpad by placing its hand on the entire surface; but more importantly, they communicate and inform that they are working on it:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301047

Though there's no doubt the iPod success was a locomotive to the MP3 players area, it is always nice to see that specialists say so. And the perspectives they foresee are shining too. They preview that yearly sales will quadruple until 2009 and reach 132 millions units. About 60% of thoser models will be based on flash memories, while hard drive models will grab hold of more and more market share year by year.

This news item isn't related to Wi-Fi...
Thx to wanfr for the story.

I was in Paris last week-end where I managed to grab a Mac Mini
1.42Ghz in the BHV [a big shop in the center of Paris] !
I went back home via Orly airport and when my luggage was controlled via x-ray the guy went : " Sir will you please open your luggage, there is an unidentified black shape in there " As you'd have guessed, it was the Mac Mini they'd noticed, and they couldn't believe their eyes so I had to open the box so they could see it for real. The guy in charge told me that using x-ray no detail could let them guess it was a computer, it was to tiny !!!!!
By the way this also was a good promotion for Apple...

On January 29th, 2004, Apple launched a warranty extension program for G3 iBooks that often had issues with their video system.
This extension comes to its end tomorrow and every mending related to this issue will afterwards have to be payed for.
Those who have those symptoms have but a few hours to find an Apple certified maintainance center and have them take care of their machine. Due to the state of decay of Apple European aftersales service, we wish them good luck...
[Upd.] Tomorrow's end of warranty will only concern machines older than 3 years. Otherwise, it will last until your iBook's 3rd anniversary. As those machines were sold until October 2003, the latest units will be under warranty till the end of 2006.

We do not have the detail yet, but Apple finally managed to get hold of the iTunes.co.uk domain name in their struggle against Benjamin Cohen.
The latter had acquired it in November 2000, well before the iTMS arrival, but the fact he made it point to a competitor of Apple probabley helped the judges making their decision.

After Yoc mentioned the release of an iPod limited edition by Venturi in a news, Phil ordered one :

..I ordered it and received it (in 4 days).
It is a 4GB, perfect packaging (as an original from Apple). The price was 255 euros without taxes, 312 euros VAT included.

To see more pics from the unpacking : http://homepage.mac.com/philippetaxil

Powerbook-fr has just published a page about the PB 12", and how to take the LCD panel appart.

The pages are in French, but are full of pictures, so that should give you a pretty good walkthrough.

Thissiteis apparently introducing something called "IPOD Mini".

Looks very similar, name is the same (with capital letters), has a 4GB drive, a battery life of 12hours...
Something that Apple Legal will love, for sure.