News for Monday, 11 September 2006

The ExpressCard port of your MacBook Pro will finally hold something else than dust, as Miglia announced a TNT compatible card.

This card including an amplificated antenna will work with the indispensable Eye TV from Elgato
It shall be available by the beginning of October for €149.
http://www.miglia.com

Pioneer's catalogue currently has a single Blu-Ray burner, the BDR-101A. As compared to its competitors, this product isn't very well placed. The reason is the lack of support of 50 Go double layer medias, but also of CDs, both for reading and burning purposes. And their competitors are actually way ahead in those areas.
That's probably the reason why they decided to unveil their next gen burners specifications.
The BDR-102A that shall arrive in January 2007 will solve these issues. But the most interesting news is about the 103 that shall replace it. On top of doing what the 102 does, and fatser, it will also be able to read HD-DVD disks. Though burning them will still be impossible, it's a very important step forward.
The problem of the tariff remains. There's little chance the prices might drop fast, because of a shortage in blue laser diods, that's supposedly due to Sony stocking them for their future PS3. Once the situation gets back to normal, prices should drop very fast in such a competitive market.

Running Windows on a Mac was a fantasy that's existed since the PowerPCs arrived. Apple, listening to their users' needs, always supported the attempts in that direction by creating machines in which a 486 would coexiste with a 6040 or a PowerPC 601 around 1995. Software designers also understood it and created useful emulators like Softwindows or Virtual PC, and this kind of products always sold very well.
Today is in some way a great leap in the past as Apple, first for reasons that had nothing to do with the mere fact of running Windows, decided to make their hardware compatible again, or at least not to prevent the installation of Microsoft's OS. So now the whole Apple line-up consists in excellent PCs, even well-placed so far as tariffs are concerned as compared to their competitors, though those are so many more.
With the release of Boot Camp, Apple went as far as possible and freed the user of any obstacles preventing him from running Windows XP, that now may run as naturally as Mac OS X. Yet there's still a tweak, even if it's hidden, as it still still takes emulating a BIOS so that Windows XP may boot.
Then the question of supporting EFI in Windows Vista arose. For the moment, Microsoft's latest announcements talk of no native EFI support before Vista server version is released (in 2007), but at the same time they made available for download beta versionss of Vista supporting EFI.
To know more and make up our own mind, we thus downloaded (legally, as we're among the 100,000 subscribers) Vista latest version, called pre-RC1. This version is dangerously close to the future final version, as RC stands for "Release Candidate". And EFI is supported.
To make sure, we installed a second hard drive in a Mac Pro, formatted ot with 2 DOS partitions in GUID mode, and then booted on Vista installation DVD. The latter naturally forced us to convert the installation partition to NTFS, but caused no problem, and we didn't even have to run Boot Camp.
Even better, we didn't even need Apple's drivers for our Mac Pro hardware and its Geforce 7300 GT to be almost entirely supported. Last but not least, the slow HD syndrom under Windows XP that some other Mac Pro users reported (which implied creating a new installation CD for XP with Intel SATA and X5000 chipset drivers included) now belongs to the past.
With this solution, the Mac Intel becomes the first machine to work in a totally native way both under Mac OS and Windows, as naturally as possible. Under Windows, even the PC peripherals become fully compatible with this WinMac (from the mere USB device to the most modern graphic card). And running a few benchmarks proved our Mac Pro was simply one of the fastest PCs available for now.
One may still wonder if Microsoft and their driver conceivers will follow the material evolutions of the Mac, yet keeping no interest in such a nice platforme would be a crime.
After ten years of attempts that weren't necessarily successful, the dream of many users finally became true...

MacWorld has published the first benchmarks of the iMac Core 2 Duo, and has compared the new iMac model with previous ones and with a Mac Pro entry-level clocked at 2.66GHz.
Despite the fact the test is comparing computers that are not matching properly for reallyevaluating performance improvement linked to the CPU upgrade, one can conclude that the Core 2 Duo Merom is indeed at least 10% faster than the Core Duo Yonah; and for some tasks (video encoding) performance gain is close to 20%.

One of our readers, Stephane has received confirmation from apple that the iSub sound system is NOT compatible with MacIntel. Even though it is a simple USB device, perfectly recognized by the MacIntel when booting on WinXP...
The reason: Apple is too lazy to update the driver for this device.
There is a solution to keep using the iSub, but transforming the USB plug into a Jack-type plug, as described in a previous article (only available in French) and published in 2002: http://www.macbidouille.com/articles/60/

As a reminder, the Paris AppleExpo will start tomorrow, and visitors might find us at the booth "Le Pommier" (Apple tree in French).

On Saturday 16th, the last day of the AppleExpo, we will organize several typical macbidouille/hardmac events:
- we will demonstrate how to upgrade a Mac mini Core Solo by installing a Core Duo Yonah 2.16GHz, a 7200rpm HD as well as 2GB of RAM.
- our readers and visitors might join the team for a "macbidouilleur" photo. Be there at the "Le Pommier" booth at 15h50 on Saturday afternoon.
We will also try to cover the tomorrow's keynote, depending on availability of our sources, as we did not get an invitation from Apple.
Since Apple seems to be controlling the release of unofficial information, it seems quite well established that the iTunes Video Store will be announced during this Keynote. We know that 5 products should be introduced on September 12th, so 4 remains unknown. One can easily imagine that iPod and iPod nano models will be upgraded; but it will not represent all the new products. At least one new product remains currently unknown. If we get serious and reliable information we will report it to you.