News for Monday, 9 October 2006

Once again, the RefurbStore was filled up with opportunities, among them represent good deals, but other ones should be avoided as much as possible.
Here's what we found on the French one:
The iMac 17" 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo /512 /80 /Combo /GMA950 for 1.079.00 Euros. This is the iMac Core Duo Education, available for the public only 5 days before being removed from the store.
These offers, which anyway are only available on the French market, are simply too expensive because its education price is: 959 euros... and on the same RefurbStore, one can get an iMac 17" 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo /512 /160 /SD /ATIX1600-128MB /BT /AP for 959 Euros..
Other iMac models might not be really good deals when comparing them with the new Core 2 Duo-based models.
The good deal might be the Mac mini Core Solo available for 479 euros, and even the Mac mini Duo 1.66GHz equipped with a SuperDrive and larger HDs.
To conclude, be careful and do not only look at the price (whatever the refurb store and the currency): Refurb Store

Since last weekend, the Apple Store has closed on several occasions, both during the day and the night, for long and short periods of time. This was the case with both the US and the European stores.
But this isn't the first time that we can recall so many closures happening in such a short time.
Apple is probably making many updates, which are still invisible. We hope that they will bring new services to us :)

DivX has a new beta of it's video encoding/decoding software.
The main changes are the support of HD formats at 1920x1080 and multi-threading support, which will greatly accelerate the software on multi-CPU machines.
http://labs.divx.com/node/251

Hugh warns us of a compatibility problem between coconutWiFi and Mac OS X 10.4.8.
If said software is active, the Airport bandwidth drops radically to a trickle (a few KB/s).
Simply deactivating the utility solves the problem... Until a proper fix is found, the developper offers an interim release which should solve the problem:
coconutWiFi_1_3.zip