News for Tuesday, 31 January 2006

While the most basic iBook comes with Airport and Bluetooth, Apple has decided they'd rather keep it out of the Powemacs, and that was already quite of an upsetting surprise. Worse was to come: you're supposed to take your machine to a licensed Apple reseller if you want to have them installed.
Olivier, who couldn't let his Powermac away for any time, managed to get the parts and assembled them in his computer :

This job was a piece of cake.
There are four elements in the box: the card, a daughter-board, two Phillips screws and two plastic clips which will hold the daughter board.
After you've plugged the antennas on the main board, you insert the card into the daughter board and and screw it with the Phillips screws. Then all you have to do is insert that module on the appropriate connector on the motherboard and clip the clips.


Now you can restart the computer and that's it!
As you can see, the card's settings correspond to an US localization and I don't know if they can be changed.

And indeed these US settings are permanent, which mean that channels 12 and 13 are not accessible.
If you had Apple do the same job, this would cost you 179 euros, and on top of that you'd have to take you Powermac to a licensed reseller. Now you can
find this card on the net and it will cost you less than 99 dollars, not including VAT and shipping.

Real has just published a press release, announcing a new unlimited music offer, compatible with Mac.
The catalogue of 1,300,000 songs is only available on streaming - no download. The subscription is $9.99 par month.

This offer is only available in the US yet.
Being radically different than the iTMS, this offer has a real chance to conquer its public, those who don't have any iPod and just want to make their own radio station, advertising-free.

Dambo reports on the Japanese paper magazine MacFan which has an article on the replacement of the 1,83GHz Core Duo chip in an iMac with a 2GHz stock Core Duo chip!
We can't tell you more for now, since the article is print only, but our correspondant w00kie is currently working in Japan and he's gonna try and get his hands on a copy.
If true, this is an excellent news, since it opens the door to easy CPU upgrades which, until now, had to go through expensive upgrade cards.