News for Monday, 4 December 2006

We might have missed the official PR from Apple Europe, but so far only AppleStores from UK, Germany and France feature an online RefurbStore.
However, as spotted by some readers from Belgium, new RefurbStores seem to be available for additional European countries.
However, if in France, UK, Germany, Austria and others, the RefurbStore is linked via a dedicated link for refurbished products, other AppleStores have a single link entitled "Special Deals" leading to refurbished products too.
So, most European users should now or in a near future be able to benefit of special discounts applied on refurbished products.
Please let us know if your local AppleStore features this new link to a local RefurbStore in the dedicated topic in our forum: here

Many graphic card manufacturers have released an AGP version based on Radeon X1950 Pro. Overall performances of such graphic cards are similar to those obtained with a X1900 XT (slightly lower).
But if the AGP version is available for PC, why ATI could not release it for Macs? It would perfectly replace the old X800, being the last and fastest AGP-based graphic card available as Mac Edition.
Let's hope that ATI/AMD will positively evaluate the market for such AGP Mac Edition card in order to satisfy Mac users. It might also be a way to stay in contact with Apple, as Steve has promoted Intel in Mac user's heart.

Apple has now 7 contractors able to provide PCB parts found in iPod models. With such a large number of suppliers, Apple is doing its best to increase volumes of iPod to satisfy consumers for Christmas buying period; but at the same time Cupertino can put the pressure on contractors to get the lowest prices possible.
Some rumor freaks might also see the sign of the forthcoming iPhone, since Apple might need equivalent PCB parts for this putative device.
Apple is also pursuing its efforts to save on packaging and shipping, as illustrated by the reduction of MB and MBPro boxes by about 50%.

Nintendo is recording a higher than expected success with its last game console, Wii. Despite competitors, Sony with the PS3 and MS with the Xbox360, the Wii flies away from the shelves, more than 600,000 units sold within the first week.
If the Wii is not a power crunching unit as the PS3 or the Xbox360, it is definitely much more innovative, the game play is simply new, powerful while remaining simple to use thanks to 2 innovating game remotes.
Photos are available from our French forum, thanks to ZaraA:
http://forum.macbidouille.com/ .
Once more Nintendo demonstrates that power is nothing without controls, and for games, better provides the best experience to users than overheating game units.
For sure the best game console would be a mix of Nintendo game play/design associated to a more powerful unit.

You might have read on the web that Parallels Desktop released a new beta of its key application, Parallels. This new version gives users possibility to boot the BootCamp partition while being on MacOSX . It requires your BootCamp partition to be formatted in NTFS format. Many users have been selecting FAT32 format for full compatibility with MacOSX. However, it remains possible to convert FAT32 to NTFS without reformatting or loosing data, as explained in this Microsoft TechNote.
The most amazing feature of this new version is probably the Coherance mode. Parallels Desktop displays Win widows inside MacOSX environment. So your working desktop is both Mac and Win, windows from both OS appears on your desktop. Current problem with this mode: exposé is not fully supported. Using this mode, you can copy and paste by dragging selection from Win to Mac windows, or via copy-paste function! In addition each OS environment keeps its IP interface.

You can download // Desktop beta here (15-days trial version).