News for Monday, 20 June 2005

Freescale has officially announced the PPC 7448, the most significant update to the MPC74xx family to date, already sampling since February 2005 and in mass production in October 2005.
To remind you, this processor is the first product from Freescale engraved at 90nm and it sports 1MB of L2 cache (instead of 130nm and 512KB for the current 7447 in PowerBooks). This processor is available in a wide range of clockspeed from its start, from 600Mz till 1.7GHz. Now a simple question: Will apple release a PPC-based PowerBook before the x86 transition? And if yes, then will the 7448 available in time for such update?
We will probably have some more information at the Apple Expo in Paris in September.
But for sure this processor will be used by upgrade card manufacturers who will propose powerful cards for Mac users not wishing to immediately join the RevA x86-based Mac models.
PS: The Intel Yonah processor (dualcore pentium-m) is also already sampling and should be available by early 2006 or even late 2005.

Digitimes just announced that Asustek beat out Quanta to grab orders for 500000 iBook 14.1". The screen should be a 16:10 widescreen.
Digitimes also confirmed that an iBook 15" will be available in '06. It may be the first MacIntel.

The RefurbStore will be opened everyday 'til June 25th. Even though there was no new offers during the weekend, today is a new day, with quite interesting offers.
PMG5 dual processors 2G with 30% discount applied on the original price.
The shortest way to the Refurb Store
in UK: there are also some PMG5 SP1.8GHz at -20% and iPod 10GB at -48%
in Germany: There are no dual 2GHz G5s.

LiveQuartz beta 5 is available.

This version adds the MacIntel compatibility (Universal binaries), a duplication tool, an option to hide the filter interface, a german localisation, etc…

For those who don't know this tool, Romain, the developer, talks about it:

LiveQuartz is a simple image editor. It is based on layers and filters.
You have the layers at the left and the filters at the right of the window.
To edit an image, you can open it with LiveQuartz or drag and drop it into the main area of the window and it will be added as a new layer. It is based on CoreData and CoreImage and is compatible with Tiger and (hopefully) future versions of MacOSX.
All manipulations are made in real-time. Common files formats such as tiff, jpeg, png, pdf, gif (read-only), pict (read-only), bmp (read-only), and jpeg2000 are supported and the LiveQuartz native format keeps layers and filters .
The LiveQuartz tools are brush, duplication tool, eraser, drag tool, text tool, spiral (CoreImage) to modify filters action points, hand for pan and scan, selection tool (crop, copy, etc...) and the magnifying glass. Although this version is not stable, the multiple undo feature allows the user to come back to the original version of the file.
The software is available in english, french and german.

http://www.rhapsoft.com

On the first of June, we mentionned the new Sony BMG anti-copy protection which did not permit the encoding for an iPod usage.
And the iPod, visibly under-estimated, overcame this new technology. Tired of having complains from iPod owners, the Majot was obliged to tell (as things come and by mail) how to by-pass the protection to allow non-protected MP3 and AAC encoding.
Therefore, Sony promised to revise its work and soon propose a new protection, compatible with iPod. A solution is in discussion between Apple and Sony.

Intel developed a protoype of a new Wi-Fi chip able to support all current 802.11 standards. That means Inte's new 802.11n will also be supported. This standard is meant to double the current rates of the 802.11x equipments, while keeping the retro-compatibility with the actual b and g standards. This chip will be proposed independantly as well as integrated into computers' chipsets.
We are already wondering how this technology would be named by Apple. It should be more powerful than extreme but less than ultimate, which is a limited period qualifier in computing.

As stated by some of our readers, the PowerPC under Mac OS X has overtaken Linux on x86 in RC5-72 statistics.
http://stats.distributed.net
You can join the Macbidouille team to prove that, while waiting for the Intel revolution, the Mac is still present!