News for Thursday, 21 April 2005

On the website of our friend André Sterpin you will see how Philippe has installed and perfectly integrated a 8x DVD burner in its good old Pismo.
http://www.sterpin.net

We were already reporting that SONY was publicly wishing to bring Blu-Ray and HD-DVD format close together in order to propose to customers only one format. Discussions have started...but ended up quite fast. Sony was simply proposing to drop HD-DVD... and HD-DVD supporters are not really willing to drop it!
So no reason to expect this commercial war could stop.

During the Cebit, the company Luxpro was exposing the Super Shuffle, an improved iPod Shuffle clone.

Few days later, Engadget after investigating, revealed that the Super Shuffle was nothing but a PR stunt.
However, one of our contact has sent us a commercial documents from Luxpro that is currently send to many resellers.
To avoid Apple lawyer’s attacks, they have a bit modified the product.

The control wheel is now different; its name is not Super Shuffle anymore, but Super Tangent. It is available in 3 colors, and 2 storage capacity options: 512KB or 1GB. Additional features: radio tuner, voice recorder, and 12 hours battery lifespan.
Apple will probably not like it, but this product, depending on its price, might compete quite strongly with the original iPod Shuffle.

A report from Paul.

One of my customers has received a small USB MP3 player from a "teasing" company.(see photo below)
It is not really nice ... but earphones have caught my attention!
Surprise! .... There are branded Apple!!!

There are many reasons which could explain why "Apple" is written on those earphones, but I guess the computer manufacturer "Apple" is probably not really going to find them legal.

If you are symbiotically linked to your iBookG3, and wish to offer it a SuperDrive, than have a look at MCE, they are proposing a DVD burner that will meet your needs. It is natively recognized by OSX, it burns DVD+/-R at 8x, and even can use DVD double layer media. And on the top, it is a slot-in model!
But do not forget that the last iApps, such as iDVD5, require a G4 or a G5. So you will need to buy third party applications to create a video DVD.
More info:
http://www.mcetech.com

Without any notice, estimated ship for all dual processor PMG5 jumped on the Apple Store from "same business day" to 7 days (most of European AppleStore, not in the US yet)
But, it is known that stocks of PMG5 dual 2.5GHz are high. So it could be the first sign of a future revision of the dual processor PMG5 models.
[Update] We have just received information from large resellers:
- There are still large stocks of PMG5 dual 2.5GHz. Those computers are “on sale” till April 29th 2005.
- There is also more than 500 iMacG5 on sales (from a single large reseller), almost exclusively 20" models. Special offer on those computers is running till May 27th.

Few hours after Intel, AMD has announced its dual core processors models. Big surprise: whereas only a dual core server processor was expected, AMD will also propose in June a dual core processor dedicated to non-professional customers.
Clock speed will be between 2 and 2.4GHz, each core sporting 512KB or 1MB of L2 cache.
IBM is the last important founder without officially a dual core processor for mass-market in its catalog.

Register now for Apple Expo 2005:
http://www.gldatasystems.fr/apple2005/form/form.asp?langue=fr
But more important... one can already register for the inaugural keynote. Knowing that the number of sits is limited, and the link to pre-register not so easy to find, we would advise you to do it as soon as possible.
http://www.apple-expo.com/fr/keynote/

Our friends from http://acme.blogs.com are still covering the events of the NAB.
They took a rather impressive pic on Apple's booth

This cute little baby hosts a whopping 156.8TB array...