News for Tuesday, 11 April 2006

Apple is proposing up to $300 instant discount on Final Cut Studio when bought simultaneously with a MacBook, an iMac or a Power Mac G5. The offer ends on June, 26th.

For additional information:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/frBusiness?...

Apple just released Apple Remote Desktop version 3.0.
Beside the native compatibility with MacIntel, this new version is claimed to includes 50 new features.

Apple Remote Desktop 3, the award-winning desktop management system for Mac OS X has more than 50 new features that deliver improvements in software distribution, asset management, and remote assistance. Apple Remote Desktop 3 offers a wide range of high performance features, including lightning-fast Spotlight searches across multiple Tiger systems; more than 30 Automator actions for easy automation of repetitive tasks; a Dashboard widget that provides quick and convenient observation of remote systems; and AutoInstall for automatically updating software on mobile systems once they return to the network.

The Unlimited Managed Systems edition will cost $499 and the 10 Managed Systems edition $299.
For additional information:
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

Yesterday, without big surprise, Toshiba has fired first, and has announced that it will release the first HD-DVD equipped notebook in May.

The Qosmio G30/697H features a 17" HD display with 1920x1200 pixels resolution. It is powered by a Core Duo T2500 clocked at 2GHz, nVidia GPU GeForce Go 7600 with 128 MB of VRAM and has space to install 2 2,5" HD that can be use in RAID 0 to enhance data transfer speed.
The optical drive will of course play HD-DVD (AACS codec), but will also be able to burn DVD and CD.
It will cost you around 400,000 Yen or 3000 Euros.
Today Fujitsu announces that it would launch desktop personal computers, as well as notebook, equipped with Blu-Ray drives in June in Japan. So Fujitsu could be the first company to release PC featuring the next generation DVD format drive Blu-Ray.
SO we can now understand why the MacBook Pro 17" has been delayed... Is Apple waiting for the first compatible Blu-Ray drive to come?
Tout ceci nous donne envie de voir arriver le MacBook Pro 17" !

thanks to Clemmm for giving us the possibility to publish his benchmarks. It will give Photoshop CS2 users a much better idea of Rosetta performance; and it might also explain why Apple has been releasing Boot Camp to provide an alternative before Universal Binaries-based Adobe Suites arrive in 2007.

It is not really easy to perform a comparison for different OS and different computers when using Photoshop, after having tried different solutions, I have been using a script provided by driverheaven.net.
This script carries out a test including 11 Photoshop functions on a 30MB RVB image file, I have tested this script on MacOSX with an iMac G5 1.9Ghz, PowerMac G5 2×2.5Ghz, MacBook Pro 2×2Ghz, and on WinXP Pro with MacBook Pro 2×2Ghz using Boot Camp and a Shuttle Pentium IV Hyperthreading 3Ghz.
Hereafter are the results in seconds to perform all functions/filers: