News for Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Macworld has posted the Apple's sales figures for the EMEA zone (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). They are excellent since 30% more Macs were sold this year than the last, while the global PC market only progressed 10.4%.
Now we're curious to see the figures for France, which had a particularly marked time these last few years.

In a press release, Freescale, the former processor division of Motorola which furnished the G4 for Apple, announced it's agreement for joint development with IBM, the manufacturer of the G3s and G5s.
This agreement will affect several aspects of it's processor manufacturing:
- Improvement from CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) and SOI (Silicon-on-Insulator) technologies to aide in the transition to 45 nm engraving.
- Joint use of production capabilities
Although Intel's success is undoubtedly not unknown to this alliance, it is important to remember that Freescale and IBM's disputes led to Apple's dropping behind in the technology race, as at one time the G4 did not manage to evolve whilst the G5 remained late in arriving.

According to some job postings, Intel is in search of people with skills in video card development. They are not looking for help with embedded chips like the GMA 950, but independent products able to rival or do better than those of their competitors as the posting talks of multi-core graphic chips.
The idea is rather tempting knowing that 3D calculations are certainly very repetitive and that a multi-core chip would be very at ease in this situation.
So check back in a couple years to see the results of the foundry's reflexions.

LG suprised everyone during the last CEBIT when they announced the release of a device that could read both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray medias. Everybody thought this would take ages to come to retail but, lo and behold! it is REAL.
Indeed, Best Buy, even claim they can ship one within a week!

OK, that would set you back a fat juicy $1199, but that would sort of bullet-proof your HD home theater against future HD war accidents.
Let's hope that other manufacturers jump on the bandwagon and that more and more HD players can read both formats.

If most Mac users will not really care about Vista launch in Europe, the price policy established by Microsoft for EU markets might push users to consider Apple and its OS.
Why? Let's look at some points:
- Microsoft offers 4 different versions of Vista (without mentioning the update versions), and at the end most users will not really be able to choose the one they really want, and their needs might evolve over time. Big head hake for consumers.
- Price of Vista licenses in EU are almost twice the price applied in USA!! The basic version costs 279€ while the full complete version will be available at... 575€. One can really seriously ask if Microsoft is acting this way to make European consumers to pay bills imposed by European commission following monopoly infringement in EU?
- when compared with Vista, MacOSX Leopard that should be sold for 129€ might look very cheap, without limiting users in their needs or usage with some weird version-dependent features as in Vista.
So after relying on iTunes for encoding music tracks of its own online music store, is Microsoft investing in advertising campaigns aiming to promote Apple products?

Four European consumer organizations joined forces to force t ofight agaisnt DRM-protected music tracks and target Apple and its iTunes Store. Hereafter is part of their claims:

Berlin/Paris/Oslo//Helsinki
Consumer organizations from across Europe have agreed on joint positions in a legal battle with Apple to achieve consumer friendly conditions for iTunes users throughout Europe. "We will join forces to safeguard consumer interests when purchasing digital content online”, the Consumer Ombudsmen in Finland and Norway, the French Consumer Organization UFC Que Choisir and the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (vzbv) declared. The four organizations agreed on a list of demands which are included in letters which all organizations wrote to iTunes today.
...
The four consumer organizations have previously initiated legal proceedings against iTunes in 2006. iTunes has been open for discussions but negotiated separately with the different national consumer organizations. The four organizations now speak with one voice and will work towards improved consumer rights and conditions for consumers throughout Europe. iTunes had also been in favor of bundling negotiations
...
Interoperability
"We believe consumers have a right to play material purchased online on a portable device of their own choice,” the four organizations said. .. An interim solution could be to definitely clarify that consumers are allowed to re-rip burnt CDs to make iTunes songs playable on other devices. However this with iTunes discussed proposal will not serve as a long-term solution. "We thus urge Apple to make substantial progress towards full interoperability until the end of September 2007.”
...
Change of conditions
On the issue of legal terms and conditions, consumer organizations insist that iTunes revoke their clause according to which iTunes may unilaterally change their terms and conditions without seeking their customers' consent.
Liability
The joint position also refers to potential damage claims linked to content sold by iTunes: "iTunes should change its clause limiting its liability to recover consumer damages if they are caused by content sold by iTunes.”
Applicable Law
The four organizations also criticize contract clauses on the law applicable in case of legal disputes: "Consumers entering into a contract with iTunes should be able to rely on the consumer protection rules according to the law of the country in which they live."

We do believe that interoperability is the way to go for the success of online music store. So, as we mention it previously, Apple should open its DRM system to third parties. We also understand that Consumer associations target Apple as the company is owning more than 70% of the worldwide online music market; however we think it would have been fair to mention other stores such as MSN, Virgin, Microsoft, etc... (as it was done on the Finish and Norwegian consumer association). However, it also proves that once European consumer associations will have found an agreement with Apple, other online stores will have to follow or die. Indeed, targeting Apple also illustrates how negligible the other players are in this business.
We also hope that Microsoft is not manipulating such associations by arguing that it is all Apple's responsibility; targeting Cupertino is fine so far it serves real consumer interest and it is not biased by some other considerations, or driven by the success of Cupertino in this business.
Last but not least, consumer associations should NOT forget that all online music stores offer DRM-protected music tracks because Music Majors have asked for... We doubt that Apple would have installed on its own.
Please comment in the dedicated topic in our forum: here

There is currently only one manufacturer of SATA DVD burners, Plextor. Of course, such models are known to be of quality, however, lack of competitors prevent prices to go down.
However, it might change in the future as Lite-On announced a new model based on SATA format: LH-20A1S. It will be the first burner able to write DVD+/-R at 20x.
Even if the bandwidth of a ATA 133 is theoretically enough to feed a DVD burner at 20x, the SATA format has many advantages: most motherboard are becoming SATA only, small wire and connector so no risk to interfere with air flow in the Mac Pro, etc.
Apple has already planned transition to all SATA for optical drives, as 2 free connectors are available on the motherboard as shown on the photo below:

As soon as the LG burner becomes available we will test it in a MacPro (expected price is around 50€).