News for Friday, 3 March 2006

Microsoft and its hardware partners are irritated by Napster's inability to compete effectively with the iTMS, which narrows the market for their would-be iPod killers.
Refusing to be the scapegoat, Napster blames Microsoft and its DRM system.
Holding now on 5% of the market - vs 80% for Apple - Napster hopes that this monopoly will come to an end within 12 to 24 months.
Let's keep our fingers crossed twice, because if Microsoft DRM system ever becomes dominant, this will be a real tragedy for OSX users. Indeed, during January MacIntel frenzy, Redmond stealthily announced its was stopping the development of Windows Media Player for Mac. Of course they developped the Flip4Mac plug-in to smooth things. But what they kept for themselves is that Windows DRM will never be available for Mac, which would keep us from playing PlayForSure protected content. While this is not an issue for the moment, it could be a real pain if DRM ever come up, especially in the realm of HD Video.

A report from one of our readers.

In one week, I have experienced 2 problems with my iMac G5 20" that is still under warranty:
1/ defective PSU (the iMac switches off randomly about 10 times per day)
2/ CD stuck in the drive making it impossible to be ejected by any method.
The computer is sent to Apple Service and then I received the following comment:
"the current warranty covers both problems, but we will only repair one problem per month. Apple is estimating that a Mac is such a reliable machine that it is almost impossible to get 2 problems in lone month. So we will exchange the PSU in March (required time: 8 days), then next month (April) you will bring back the machine to and it will be shipped to a Certified European centre to have its drive replaced (required time 2 to 3 weeks)

We've asked for additional information from our sources who are well informed about the current Apple Service policies.

You can order spare parts for a computer from Apple only one by one... And you need to wait 11 days before placing a new order for a second part. If not, the AppleCenter is financially penalized by Apple, and in the end it has to pay all repair/exchange parts from its own budget... They always start repairing the most obvious part first, but if you exchange the motherboard, and the defective component is the PSU, the new motherboard will probably be destroyed too... Consequently, you will need to wait for 22 days before being able to give the repaired computer back to the customer. When the machine is returned to the AppleSupport provider too often (from 5 to 10 times), or if the customer is not really happy with the service, Apple sometimes provides a complete computer exchange at the SOLE DISCRETION of Apple. Such a support policy is not really friendly for the customer, but Apple is not the only company using it... Sony is doing it too!

If such policy is designed to reduce, as much as possible, support costs, it quickly becomes unacceptable for the customer if he has to face multiple and repeated problems with his computer. These policies are also in effect in North America, however, Apple does NOT penalize clients in this fashion via The Apple Store. They do not apply the same standards on their own stores as they do on their dealers..
, thanks to daBoss for his comments

NVIDIA has announced the released of new drivers for the PC which enable hardware acceleration of H.264 decoding.
The acceleration works on the GeForce 6xxx and 7xxx series of cards.
It's now up to Apple to implement these functions in their drivers so that we can also utilize this on our Macs.

Quentin, a reader from Brussels, received his iPod Hi-Fi yesterday which he had ordered on the day of its release. He has posted many photos of the unpacking in the forums. Here are three of them:



You can get a better feeling for the size, with the iPod connected as in the above shot.
Seeing how the product is setup, it seems targeted more at being mobile than being in a fixed position.
You have to wonder if the fact that it runs on batteries will be of interest to other people such as campers...
To see the other photos:
http://forum.macbidouille.com