News for Sunday, 29 April 2007

If you plan to attend the largest Apple event in Europe, pre-registration to the Apple Expo 2007 is now opened. As usual, the Apple Expo will take place in Paris, Porte de Versailles, Hall 5, from September 25th to 29th.
It will be for us the occasion to meet our readers as we should have a booth together with other Mac-dedicated websites.
For additional information, the official webpage of the Apple Expo: http://www.apple-expo.com/, and the direct link to the Pre-registration homepage

While Apple released the Battery Update 1.2 supposed to improve the behavior of battery models found in ALL MacBook and MacBook Pro (here), Cupertino also acknowledges that some batteries used in its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks may have battery performance issues not related to firmware problems but rather defective components (there:

For MacBook and MacBook Pro systems with Intel Core Duo processors, this program extends repair coverage on the battery for up to two years from the date of purchase of the computer.
Identifying an affected battery
Affected batteries will have one or more of the following symptoms:
- Battery is not recognized causing an “X” to appear in the battery icon in the Finder menu bar.
- Battery will not charge when computer is plugged into AC power.
- Battery exhibits low charge capacity/runtime when using a fully charged battery with a battery cycle count (as shown in System Profiler) of less than 300.
- Battery pack is visibly deformed.

We are pleased to see Apple finally responding to a problem for which we have been publishing numerous news and reports over the last couple of weeks. Now Cupertino, it is time to launch the same exchange program for the short lifetime AirPort Express.

The story is so unusual that we decided to publish it; it was reported by a journalist, being as well one of our european readers.
He requested from Apple an iPod 80GB unit for writing a review about it. Last week, he received it, and started analyzing the product. Yesterday morning, he received a call from Apple urging him to send the iPod back as soon as possible. The reason: Apple wants to get all iPod samples distributed to news network back for next Friday latest.
Of course one can imagine many different hypothesis regarding the true reason behind such urgent recall, but as illustrated by the title of this news, we think Apple is preparing the introduction of the long-awaited revision of the iPod 5.5G.