News for Wednesday, 13 September 2006

Many journalists discovered yesterday the consequences of playing the big game of rumour. There was no iPhone, while for some its announcement had become quite certain.
We're not making fun ot them, as it's always tempting, especially with Apple, to try and search for scoops.
Yet if it is true that, as we told you lately, Apple have become more lenient on their policy of secret, it was still at its climax before yesterday's keynote. There were only a handful of persons in the know in Europe, a small handful. And those persons did nothing to contest rumours, even the craziest ones.
Anyway, even if it's easier to say so afterwards, there was no real point for Apple to release an iPod Video or an iPhone.
- The iPhone would have arrived on a market that's very competitive and ruled by a few giants. None of them would have been glad if Apple had arrived. All the same for mobile phones operators who sell musics and ringtones at a high price. They wouldn't have accepted to propose such a mobile in their offers, or they would have lost market shares to the iTMS.
Despite of what Apple fans think, an iPhone might as well have the same carreer than the Newton.
- As for the iPod Vidée, with a big display, the question is much the same, though not identical. Is there a market for such a device ? Archos's lack of success as that as the weak sales of the UMD for a PSP don't indicate that. On top of that, a big screen with tactile functions and a really big capacity HD would make this device almost as expensive asa MacBook, which would surely mean its death.
Of course it's easier to make this analysis after the announcements, but it's no surprise Apple didn't want to engage in almost unwinnable battles.

And the wave of updates keeps going!
Compressor 2.3 is released via the software update panel.
This new version is recommended to all users of Compressor 2.1 as it fixes performance issues and improves stability.
One can expect the Final Cut Studio suite to follow soon.

While we were expecting a live stream yesterday, the link was simply prepared for the usual post-keynote QuickTime video:
http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/sep_2006/event/index.html
The new iPod nano ads are also available from the apple website: there .

The faulty server, which was making hardmac.com unreachable for hours last week, has been fixed yesterday evening and all macbidouille.com and hardmac.com services should be back to normal (especially RSS feed).
So we have now 4 servers:
- 1 for macbidouille.com and hardmac.com websites and associated services.
- 1 for the forum.
- 1 for managing advertising campaigns on websites and forums.
- 1 server for managing files.
We hope that it will be enough for the forthcoming months with the increasing number of visitors on our websites.
We would like to thanks those of you who have sent us messages last week to support the team when we had to face this major technical issue.
Thanks for your support and for reading hardmac.com.

Fabricius has bought a game for his iPod 5G. First comments:

It is quite straightforward, but as music tracks, iPod games are protected; and are only available for iPod 5G (iPod Video).
I have chosen the game Vortex, 4.99€ (not really cheap).
then the game appears on iTunes list, including a detailed user manual.
Installing the game is simple, you only need to synchronize your iPod, and then the game will show up in the menu Extra, then Games.
It requires a couple of seconds to launch the game, including a video animation.
Using the click-wheel you will have to enter your nickname!
Then you will get access to the game menus, you can easily browse through them(New Game/Volume/Option/Music/Brightness/controls/Difficulty/Stats/Help/Quit) with the click-wheel.
Simply click on the central button to select the menu/option or to launch the game. You can pause the game at anytime, even quit it, without loosing anything. While playing you still have the possibilities to get access to all iPod menus, pretty useful.
The game will stop after some times of inactivity, probably for preserving battery lifespan. It seems that games are less power-consuming than videos.

When visiting the Apple Expo, go to Apple's booth, and in particuler where MB and MBPro are exposed. There, you will find the new iPod nano models.