News for Thursday, 20 October 2005

iTunes 6.01 (weighing in at 12.8MB) is now available via Software Update.

With iTunes 6.0.1, you can preview, buy, and download over 2,000 videos on the iTunes Music Store and sync your music and purchased videos with iPod to enjoy on the go. To watch purchased videos, you must have Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
iTunes 6.0.1 features several stability improvements over iTunes 6.
After purchasing music from the iTunes Music Store with iTunes 6 or later, you will also need to upgrade your other computers that purchase music from the iTunes Music Store to iTunes 6.0.1.

This latter remark suggests to us that this might be a patch for a security flaw for iTMS purchases.

Apple's secrecy has drawbacks. Most of their employees know nothing of new products to come.
So in order to know, they do just like you... and follow our lives. JC took those pics yesterday during Satis when new products were being announced.


Apple could at least provide them live information :)

The website http://media.99mac.se proudly published the first tests of the new PowerMacs G5 dual-core 2GHz and 2.3GHz.
The two computers have been benchmarked with XBench to a G5 Dual 2.5Ghz. Even though this soft is far from a perfect benchmarking solution, it still shows that the new 2.3GHz dual-core is faster than the older Dual 2.5GHz, which is good news for those who intended to buy these new machines, or even better the Quad 2.5GHz!
Surprisingly, the new dual-core gets better marks than the older models in the field of memory access. The other way round was expected. Possibly, a bigger amount of L2 cache memory plus a higher data rate from and to the SDRAM (albeit its latency is higher) might have balanced the loss of a data bus. Then we can only expect great performances from the Quad G5!
Next logical step would be to have one of these computer run demanding softwares heavily relying on RAM access. That way we would really get a clear picture of what they really have in the guts.
Surprisingly too are the graphics results of the 2.3GHz dual-core/Geforce 6600 couple, which are better than those of the 2.5GHz dual/6800 Ultra. I don't think that PCI-Express has anything to do with that although it is a possibility that the driver of the 6800 is not really optimized. These should be checked through "real life benchmarking" with games like Doom 3 or applications making generous use of the graphic card.

After the inside of a new G5, here are some more non bloody dissections:
- Kodawarisan entirely took apart the new iMac. Here's a picture from that motherboard we've already talked to you about:

It is much smaller than the one from the preceding line. Notice the CPU heatsink is outside of it.
- jefferies.bluematrix opened an iPod 5G to estimate its cost for Apple.

The 30 Go manufacturing cost is estimated 143.50$, which would give Apple a 52% raw margin on this product.
Of course this raw margin won't include many costs, such as research and development, factory costs, promotion, packaging, delivering...

Thx to Laurent for sending us those pics taken from a G5 announced yesterday.



On the one where the heatsink cache has been taken away, you'll see that the motherboard is the same for both single and dual CPU machines.

As expected, the PowerMacs got upgraded last night. While the outlook has not changed (a still trendy casing copied in the PC world), the inside has evolved not unlike the new iMac has. Thus, all configurations come up with:
- 8 memory slots accepting ECC or NECC 533Mhz DDR2 RAM (to be installed in pairs)
- 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support
- 3 open PCI Express expansion slots (the fourth one is used by the graphic card)
- 2 Serial ATA ports
- 30" display support
- 1 or 2 dual-core G5
- 2 Ethernet Gigabit ports
Now here are the specifications of the various configurations:
Dual 2 Ghz : €2,078.99 (VAT included for all)
Estimated Ship: 1-3 business days
Dual-core 2GHz PowerPC G5 processor
1GHz frontside bus per processor
1MB L2 cache per core
512MB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-4200)
160GB Serial ATA hard drive
16x SuperDrive (double-layer)
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE with 128MB GDDR SDRAM

Dual 2.3 Ghz : €2,599.00
Estimated Ship: 1-3 business days
Dual-core 2.3GHz PowerPC G5 processor
1.15GHz frontside bus per processor
1MB L2 cache per core
512MB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-4200)
250GB Serial ATA hard drive
16x SuperDrive (double-layer)
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256MB GDDR SDRAM
Quad 2.5 Ghz : €3,399
Estimated Ship: 3-4 weeks
Two dual-core 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 processors
1.25GHz frontside bus per processor
1MB L2 cache per core
512MB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-4200)
250GB Serial ATA hard drive
16x SuperDrive (double-layer)
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256MB GDDR SDRAM
And the options :
- €100 to reach 1 GB, €300 to reach 2 GB
- €1000 for 2x500 GB Serial ATA
- As for graphics, €60 will upgrade you from the 6600 LE 128MB to the 6600 256MB. But if you want the so professional Quadro FX 4500 512 MB (which supports two 30" displays), you will have to pay €1770 !
- €100 for airport + bluetooth (optional on every configuration)
- €55 for the USB RTC modem
- €321 for the AppleCare maintenance contract
We were hoping for lower prices to sustain the sales while we wait for the MacIntels...