News for Wednesday, 19 April 2006

Apple announced today financial results for the fiscal 2006 second quarter. The company posted revenue of $4.36 billion, and a net profit of $410 million. Apple has shipped 1,112,000 Macintosh units and 8,526,000 iPods during this quarter, representing 4 percent growth in Macs and 61 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter. So it seems that Intel transition did not really decrease hardware sales, especially for a quarter that is usually the least active one over the year.
With several Mac models waiting for their Intel transition within the next 4 months (MB Pro 17" end of April, MacBook in May and the Power Mac in September), hardware sales should not decline for the second half of 2006, and SJ and Apple might really be on track for one of the smoothest CPU transitions in the company's history.
If you want to get additional details, follow the Q2 2006 financial results conference to the following address: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq206/

Seagate announced yesterday it would release the first 3.5" hard drive to implement the Perpendicular Recording technology, which allows a significant boost in capacity.
The Cheetah 15K.5 is a high-end product aimed at the server market. It spins at 15000rpm and gets connected through SCSI 320, serial SCSI or Fibre Channel. It comes out in three flavours: 73, 147 or 300 GB. This is huge, indeed, for this kind of drive which typically sacrifies disk capacity for better performances.
A few more months and we might see this technology beginning to be used in everyday computers.

Apple has released new firmware updates for all MacIntel models:
http://search.info.apple.com/?...
There is no information regarding the benefit or bug fix of those firmware, and all previous updates have disappeared from the download webpage.

An update is available for Tiger: Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 4, and should soon be available on Apple Download website. It weights 39.3MB and does NOT require rebooting your computer.

About Java 2Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 4
Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 4 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 on Mac OS X v10.4.5 and later.
This release includes J2SE version 1.5.0_06. With this update J2SE 5.0 becomes the preferred Java version, superseding Java 1.4.2. Java 1.4.2 is still installed on your machine, but applications will run with J2SE 5.0 unless they specifically request Java 1.4.2.
For more details on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n302983

Please notice: after installing this update the version 5.0 is automatically selected as the JVM instead of the previous one, version 1.4.2.