News for Friday, 15 June 2007

As you might have noticed it from the WWDC keynote, advertising banners for freeware and shareware are being displayed on hardmac.com. This is part of our program to support such developers to be better known by the Mac community. As announced on June 8th, freeware developers are freely advertising on hardmac, while shareware developers can display their banners for free on hardmac if agreeing to offer discounted prices for our readers. Finally, there is a special campaign organized by XtraLean Software to celebrate Father's Day.
So, do not hesitate to visit developer's websites, it might be the perfect occasion to test and discover new applications; and if you like them, then support developers by donating or buying their products.

On April 4th, the release of a high-end Mac Pro based on two Quad Core Xeon clocked at 3.0GHz came as a surprise as this CPU was officially not available from Intel. Indeed, the fastest one was officially the Quad Core Xeon 5355 clocked at 2.66GHz.
The Mac Pro will keep its leadership till August. On July 29th, the Quad Core Xeon 3.0GHz will be officially available on the market. If you plan to upgrade your 4 Core Mac Pro to an 8 Core model with such CPU, it will cost you a lot: US$ 1172/CPU for 1000 units ordered. It will be much "cheaper" to go for the Xeon 5355 available for only US$ 744/CPU.

Another major price cut should take place by the end of the year when new Xeon CPU featuring a faster bus (1666MHz vs. 1333MHz today) will be released. The Mac Pro will most likely be updated around this time frame to be powered by those new CPU while featuring a new chipset too. However, it remains unclear if those new Xeon will be engraved at 45nm or still at 65nm as today.

From now on, Japanese consumers visiting the music section of Yahoo! website will be redirected to iTunes Store if they want to purchase some tracks or album.
If this is a success for Apple, it a serious drawback for SONY, as the Japanese company was the Yahoo!'s default partner for online digital music store in Japan.
For sure Yahoo! will generate some revenue from this partnership, and in this case, one should be associated with the largest online music store, in other words, Apple iTunes Store.

Apple released an update of Safari 3 for Windows. The short time period between Safari 3 official launch and the first update illustrates how important it is for Apple to deliver a stable and reliable browser on Windows.
From first reports, this new update does not turn the original application on a rock solid one, and one will probably have to wait for month before Safari 3 reaches a reliability level equivalent to iTunes on PC.
If you want a deeper analysis of Safari 3 on Windows, have a look at: http://www.4i.com/ipodblog

Intel, Google, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Lenovo... decided to launch the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
The main goal is to design and manufacture energy-efficient computers, including desktop, notebook and servers. The first goal will be to increase the efficiency of power supplies to 90% by 2010; it will not dramatically change computer design and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons per year.
The road to a really power-efficient computing will be long, and simply by looking at the most power-consuming components in a computer, one can identify which companies will need to improve their policies. Intel (and probably AMD) has brought advanced power management in mobile CPU to increase battery life and performance/watt, and the company plans to extend such system to desktop and servers CPUS where if it does already exist, it is not as advanced. Graphic card manufacturers are probably the companies which will have to work on "greener" models, as the race for the fastest GPU is today leading to the race of the most power-eager component.
If ATI is a member of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative via AMD, NVidia as well as Apple are not in the list of initial supporters. Of course, Apple will deliver "greener" computer models thanks to the efforts made by Intel and other component manufacturers, but it might have been a good idea to join this initiative supported by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), even Microsoft is in...

During the Computex, and to demonstrate the quality and reliability of its motherboard and components, Abit overclocked an Intel Core 2 Extreme to 5GHz.

Using liquid nitrogen to clock it down, the CPU reached 5GHz instead of the original 2.93GHz. On PC, notebook or desktop, one can significantly overclock the Core 2 CPUs via the motherboard BIOS very easily while it remains impossible on Mac as Intel locks multiplication coefficient and the lack of information on the EFI prevents us to find the beginning of a track leading to the overclock of a CPU on Mac. We obtained a piece of information by accident from the HD of a refurbished computer which was not erased and still loaded with Apple test applications. The bus frequency might be defined in the SMC.

Last March, we were reporting the unlucky story of one of our team member with his more than 3-years old PowerBook 17".

A screw came out and induced a short-circuit, and definitely killed the motherboard. From our French forum, numerous PowerBook 17" owners were reporting similar story, or when opening their notebook to check the screw found it loosely attached.
Yesterday, one of our team members, Yoc, lost his similarly aged PowerBook 17" the same way.

The very same screw created a short-circuit almost exactly at the same place. If in March, one could have thought that this screw was coming out due to physical or mechanical stress applied when carrying the notebook, for Yoc's PB it can not be: it was a used as a desktop computer which was almost never moved.
If you own a PB 17" and have the skilled required doing it, or living close to an Apple Center, you should really have a look at this screw. You will need a Torx T9 screw-driver.