News for Tuesday, 19 April 2005

Apple is proposing a new service to Business and Professional customers:

Apple Business Consultants Programme
If you have questions before you complete your Apple Store online order, there is a way to get immediate answers. Apple now offers the convenience of free live chat to help you get answers fast. It’s called the Apple Business Consultants Programme. Consultants are available online from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm GMT in the United Kingdom to help you with questions about your Apple Store order, or with selecting the best product or solution for your business. Starting a chat and getting your questions answered is just a click away.

This service is currently only available in UK (test phase), and is NOT an AppleCare. If this service is successful, let's hope that it will be expanded to other European countries.
More information available on the following addresses:
Apple Store Business UK
Apple Business Consultants Programme: LiveChat

Excellent news for Apple. According to Gartner, they reached the 5th rank of computer manufacturers in the US just overcoming Toshiba. Mac sales volume increased by 45% in a year! And market share has grown from 2.6% to 3.7%
Let's hope figures will be as good for other lands, and especially if Apple would go back in the Top 10 in France.

Apple is proposing, between April 12th and May 23rd, 2005, 30€ discount for a one-year .Mac membership. So it will cost you 69€. You can use this action to renew your current membership if its anniversary date is soon.
If you order it via internet, you will immediately have the 30€ deduce from your bill.
If you buy a box from an Apple Reseller, it will be "mail-in rebate" procedure. More information:
http://www.apple.com/uk/promo/getmore/

The war between both candidate for the future blue laser-based storage media is far to be finished. So far, it was mainly on the marketing side, based on a battle of announcements; but it seems that the real battle is approaching.
Ritek and CMC Magnetics, 2 of the largest media manufacturers, have announced that they were actively preparing HD-DVD media production. It should start in Q3 or Q4 2005; whereas Blu-Ray media production should not start before Q1 or Q2 2006.
This is one of the strength of HD-DVD media over Blu-Ray. Both media and players are much easier to produce by simply modifying the current DVD media/player production lines.

Think Secret has added more details to the (disappointing to our point of view) future PMG5 update. In summary, it should be a simple speed bump update, without any serious modification of hardware parts: no dual core, no PCI Express. But let's hope that they are wrong, for the time being it is only a rumor...

To celebrate Windows 20th anniversary, Microsoft will launch an ad campaign related to Windows XP in 11 different countries over a period of 15 month!! This campaign is aimed to demonstrate the "creative" potential of WinXP...
What could be the reason of such a humongous commercial campaign?? It might simply be because many users start considering Linux and Mac OSX as a real alternative to Windows.

It is still not clear whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will be the the winner of the current on going war between both format. However, many companies are already working on the next generation of storage media technology: Holographic-based technique. The company InPhase Technologies has demoed a system based on a 12cm media with a capacity of 300GB. They are already claiming that this technology should allow storage of up to 1.6TB on the same media in 2009. As for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, many companies have already entered the competition for holographic storage.
This type a early announcement is becoming nowadays quite usual, marketing wise t is important for those companies; however it might also have a negative impact for them: customers can not have a clear idea of the future standard and as a consequence delay their investments.

Many users have reported problems when using Java-based application after 10.3.9 update. Apparently, to avoid this problem, you simply need to reinstall "Security Update 2005-002" which can be downloaded here:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate2005002macosx1034orlater.html

Seagate has just released a 120GB model to their Momentus line of hard drive. This big boy will come in both 4,200 and 5,400 rpm variants. They also announced a 7,200 rpm 100GB disk, which sports a seek time of 10.5ms against the 12.5 that is standard across the 5,400 rpm line. We'll try to test those hard drives as soon as we can get our hands on them.