News for Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Last night, Apple seems to have either played with Mac rumor websites or published online a non official information about the availability of Quad Core Xeon 5355-based Mac Pro, as shown below.

They closed down all Apple Store to remove all traces of this information, but such Mac Pro model is expected to be released from weeks, and it is now probably only a matter of hours or days.
If you want to know what to expect about such 8 Cores-based Mac Pro, you can read our previous articles describing the procedure to upgrade current Mac Pro with the Xeon 5355 and how such raw power translate into performance gains.
In summary, if Apple-branded audio and video applications are not modified to take advantage of such power, the investment might be too expensive, except if you are used to work with simultaneous multitasking.
[update]: It seems that we might have to wait for another week, next Tuesday maybe.

As we reported it previously, we have decided to upgrade the CPU of an iMac Core Duo with a Core 2 Duo T7600.

If the processor is perfectly recognized once installed, disassembling the iMac was a real nightmare.


We will take couple of days before providing you with a step-by-step procedure, as easy as possible, to perform this CPU upgrade, but be sure that upgrading the Mac mini to Core 2 Duo was a piece of cake compare to the similar operation on an iMac.

In a press release, Elgato announced the end of its licensing agreement with Miglia:

Munich, March 12, 2007 - Elgato Systems announces that it has terminated the licensing agreement for EyeTV software with Miglia Technology, Ltd. Miglia can no longer ship, sell or advertise TV Tuner solutions bundled with Elgato's EyeTV software.
Customers using EyeTV with a Miglia TV tuner product are not affected by this change. Elgato EyeTV will continue to work with existing Miglia products. Elgato will continue to support existing Miglia/EyeTV customers with software updates and improvements.

While Miglia does not mention this news on its website, such announcement is not a real surprise as both companies are now competing on the market for TV or DTT tuner and devices for the Mac.

If the current marketing strategies expect the DVD to be replaced by the winner of the war between BD and HD-DVD, many companies are trying to extend the lifetime of the red laser-based DVD.
The company New Medium Enterprises unveiled a 4 layers DVD on which one could store 20GB of data thanks to a specific red laser burner. The main advantage over blue laser technologies is the reduced costs of such red laser compatible drive while media should have a similar price. Of course data transfer speeds are lower, but 40MB/s is more than enough for feeding a full HD video streaming.

Intel announced its entry in the storage market. Of course, the company does not intend to compete with HDs manufacturers, a field with low margin where R&D costs and marketing can barely be compensated by small margins. No, Intel expects to use its expertise in semi-conductor and from its joint-venture with Micron to offer flash-memory based storage devices and products.
The Z-U130 is a NAND-based storage unit available as a USB2 or an HD interface, featuring capacity ranging from 1 to 8 GB. Data Transfer speeds will be 28MB/s read and 20MB/s write. If such speeds seems lower than those obtained with standard HDs, the access time are much more reduced.

Above is a photo of a USB2 model which could be installed directly on a USB port located on the motherboard.

The website Newlauches reports the story of an unfortunate australian MacBook owner.

While the notebook was charging and not in use, a fire seemed to have ignited from the battery location, thankfully it was rapidly controlled and flames put out. This is to our knowledge the first case reported, but it comes one day after our news concerning current issues with batteries from MB Pro 15" and 17".
Last year, massive battery recalls due to defective notebook batteries manufactured by SONY was only concerning Li-Ion type units, while today's story involves a Lithium Polymer battery reported to be safer, and from a higher technology standard.
Apple did not react yet to this news, as they did not from our yesterday's report.