News for Wednesday, 1 February 2006

Thanks to Rodolphe for this info.
To celebrate the first anniversary of the famous MMORPG, World of Warcraft, that recently reaches over one million customers in Europe, Blizzard has decided to launch a series of contests/events. Hereafter is part of the announcement:

Among the events will be a fan art contest with the theme "One Year of Loving World of Warcraft." We will also be running a World of Warcraft pick-up lines competition. There will be cool prizes such as Blizzard iPods, graphics cards and Dell gaming PCs for the lucky winners. We will be posting the terms and conditions of the contests, as well as more information about the prizes, within the coming days.

As Rodolphe, we are curious to know if the Blizzard iPod will only be a standard iPod with an engraved Blizzard's logo, or it will be a more "revamped" iPod.
Official webpage: Upcoming Anniversary Contests

Apple dropped the price of the iMac G5 20". The new price is 1,599 euros (£ 1,049 in UK) including VAT, which means 200 euros (or £ 180 for UK) off.
The price of the 17" remains the same in France, while it is £ 30 off in UK (new price: £ 899)
iMac G5 on Apple Store

Thanks to Patrick for the info!
Last week, Apple signed an agreement with the Belgian telecom company Belgacom and its subsidiary Skynet (Internet Provider) for the online music distribution. This one will now use iTMS, despite Skynet Music Club, an OD2 (On Demand Distribution) partner, was its main competitor.
As stated in Belgacom's official press release, "In order to professionalize its music offering, and effectively respond to its customers’ needs, Belgacom and Skynet cooperate with iTunes"
One can note Belgacom's beautiful homage to Apple and its iTMS, "driver of the digital music revolution and most important actor of the market"
This agreement also plans to sell iPods in Belgacom's sales corners.
Concretely, Belgacom's ADSL customers already members of the Skynet Music Club, as well as new subscribers will get a coupon for a free download of 20 songs before April 30th, 2006 but will also have access to more than 2 million songs in AAC format (bye bye WMA!). Current customers can still use their remaining credit on Skynet Music Club before end of March, 2006. The press release also notes that ADSL Go, ADSL Plus and VDSL Boost customers can also "subscribe as of April 2006 to a huge free download program on iTunes".
Here is the look of the new Belgacom homepage on iTMS:

This agreement between Apple and an Internet Provider (having its own page on the iTMS) is, according to our sources, the very first one worldwide, and no doubt about the e-mule-ation ;) that will come to this market segment!

While we have just discovered DDR2 533 on the G5 and DDR2 667 on the MacIntel, Intel is already preparing the transition to DDR3 for next year.
This memory chip technology allows a doubled bandwidth for the same base frequency. Meanwhile, Intel's top end will use DDR2 800.
Still, DDR2 should survive until the end of the decade.

The 802.11n has only been ratified a week ago but some manufacturer, such as Broadcom, are already offering compatibles products. The standard is not yet fixed though and should still undergo modifications in the next coming months.
However, it is not the first time that this happens with 802.11x manufacturers.
Apple launched the Airport Extreme (802.11g) before the standard was completely fixed. Firmware updates made the products compatible afterwards.
The 802.11n standard should triple the bandwith of the "g" while significally increasing the range.
We are looking forward to reading your guess on which name Apple will use for this standard, when they'll adopt it :)

Watching cameras are worth a fortune.
If you don't have such a budget, the site Econtechnologies show how to use an iSight for such a purpose (thanks to Patrice).


Of course the trickiest thing is to deploy a very long Firewire cable...

Thanks to Thierry for his funny message.

I just received iWork and iLife '06
After miniaturizing the iPod in an iPod Mini than an iPod Nano, Apple seems to be following the same trend for their software boxes.
After being used to get big boxes full of emptiness (the most recent one being Tiger), the boxes sizes began to downsize last year, and eventually reached a smaller size this year.
After iPod, iPod Mini and iPod Nano, here are iBox, iBox Mini and iBox Nano :D
Those boxes are now no bigger than a CD.
So: cost reductions for packaging, or ecological purpose, or the two of those?

Apple actually domnsized all their packaging sizes, even those of the latest G5s which lost about 30% volume. It is a necessary step to cut storing costs when you're about to reach 10% or more market shares :)

As promised in a preceding news, w00kie, who's in Japan, got hold of the Macfan article.

The journalist states he bought a Core Duo 2 GHz CPU in a PC shop and installed it in his machine in place of its 1.83 GHz.
The machine booted flawlessly and system information displayed the right 2 GHz frequency.
Here are some explanations about how this can be.
A CPU frequency is related to two parameters, the bus frequency, and the multiplying coefficient of the CPU.
On G3s and G4s, the easier way for overclocking was to modify the multiplying coefficient. Yet to prevent such a manipulation, Intel, and then AMD, locked those coefficient setttings directly inside the CPUs. That's why overclocking of X86 CPUs require modifying the system bus frequency.
So, as any other CPUs, the Core Duo have a locked coefficient. The system bus of those machines is at 166MHz (x4 = the announced 667). The original CPU had a coefficient locked to 11. The 2 GHz one is locked at 12.
That's why the simple fact of changing it allowed to reach the right, reference frequency, without any further modification.
The real good news is that Apple didn't find useful to add a lock inside the EFI in order to prevent a potential upgrade.
Whether changing the CPU will not result in a noisier machine, because of fans turning faster, still remains to be seen.
From an anecdotic point of view, a 2 GHz Core Duo costs about 480 Euros in France, while the 2.16 GHz version costs over 700. The game is clearly not worth it yet. It will take several months for those prices to drop significantly.