News for Tuesday, 7 August 2007

Following today's Apple Stores updates, a new option has been added for the Mac Pro: RAID5 Mac Pro RAID card. This card supports RAID0, 1, 5, 0+1 and JBOD.

The Mac Pro RAID card offers improved performance and data protection to your Mac Pro system — up to 304MB/s of sequential read performance in RAID 0. Ideal for video and creative professionals with demanding storage needs as well as for tower server applications, this hardware RAID option supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD. It has 256MB of cache and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting the RAID cache. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) and connects to the four internal drive bays.
The Mac Pro RAID card supports the creation of multiple RAID sets in a system and multiple volumes per RAID set. For optimal disk utilization in a RAID set, all hard drives should be the same size. Your Mac Pro system ships with each hard drive individually configured in the Enhanced JBOD level with Mac OS X installed on the drive in bay 1. Using Apple's RAID Utility software, you can migrate the drives into a RAID set without reinstalling Mac OS X or reformatting the drives, or you can customize your RAID volumes to meet your exact requirements.

This nice option has a price: US$999 and in addition the Mac Pro RAID card occupies one of the available PCI Express expansion slots.

Following today's announcements, some Apple applications have been updated to ensure compatibility with new functions unveiled in iLife '08:
- Aperture 1.5.4 Update (129.7MB)
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/aperture154update.html

Aperture 1.5.4 is required for compatibility with iLife '08. This update is recommended for all Aperture users

- iPhoto 7.0.1 (8.8MB)
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/iphoto701.html

This update to iPhoto addresses issues associated with publishing photos from an upgraded library to .Mac Web Gallery.

- Front Row 1.3.1 (4.5MB)
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/frontrow131.html

This Front Row update provides for improved iPhoto compatibility.

The Mac mini has finally be updated to Core 2 Duo, even though it was only mention during the Q&A session of today's Special Event. The Apple Stores being closed, we could not figure out if the new Mac mini is based on the old and original Napa platform or on the recently introduced Santa Rosa. But we could spot the specification and prices of both models:
- Core 2 duo 1.83 GHz, ComboDrive, 1 GB RAM, HD 80 GB: 599 euros
- Core 2 duo 2.0 GHz, Superdrive, 1 GB RAM, HD 120 GB: 799 euros
[update]
Well it is the good old Napa platform, so no Santa Rosa for the Mac mini, simply a larger HD and faster CPU. Our Mac mini upgrade from September 2006 is still a better value than the new Mac mini!!
Link to the article and the step-by-step procedures: Adding C2D Merom in Mac mini and Merom price/performance analysis

The new iMac, available in 2 sizes only (20" and 24") has been introduced today by Steve jobs during the Mac Special Event. Beside the usual CPU/GPU speed bumps and larger HD, the new iMac features a new enclosure, based on Aluminium and glass. A new keyboard is of course available to perfectly go along with the new style.

On the hardware side, all configurations will feature 1GB RAM, WiFi 802.&&n and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR:
- 20", intel core 2 duo 2 GHz, HD 250 GB, ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT: 1199 euros
- 20", intel core 2 duo 2.4 GHz, HD 320 GB, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro: 1499 euros
- 24", intel core 2 duo 2.4 GHz, HD 320 GB, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro: 1799 euros
- 24", intel core 2 duo 2.4 GHz, HD 500 GB, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro: 2219 euros
The new iMac can sport up to 4GB of RAM (Santa Rosa) and can be powered by Core 2 Duo Merom Extreme clocked at 2.8GHz which is not available before September according to Intel reports... but Apple might have some special deal with Intel, as with the Xeon Quad Core 3.0GHz in the past.
Link to enjoy The new iMac on the Apple Store
The Apple Stores are closed again

Lucky guys from Hardspell.com could get a Penryn CPU, and immediately tested it versus its current Conroe CPU equivalent (clock frequency).
As announced by Intel, the Penryn is slightly faster than its equivalent Conroe, but performance gain for specific tasks can reach 30%. This is particularly true for multimedia applications, as it was expected from Intel reports. When making intensive use of SSE instructions, the Penryn can really be much faster and fully unveil its true power, the DivX beta 6 simply runs 115% faster. This is a good point, and the iApps should benefit of such improvements, as SSE are often compared to the Altivec for PPC.

We will try to provide the best coverage for this Apple Mac special Event which should start at 19h00 CET, where new iMacs, iWorks and iLife are expected to be released.
Hereafter are some details:
- follow it on this special whizz-bang self-refreshing page: http://events.hardmac.com (currently displaying coverage from last WWDC Keynote, to be refreshed later this evening)
- Our coverage will start around 19h15.
- We will be gathering bits and pieces from various live coverages, and internal sources as we do not have a Hardmac correspondent attending the Event.
We'll do our best to bring you the most up-to-date and comprehensive information...

MacMod, the Mac tuning-dedicated website, has launched recently its Annual Mod Challenge. This is of course a good way to discover new mods and learn some tips and tricks for upgrading/updating or nicely modifying your Macs.
You can compete in all or in of the following Mod categories:
Internal Mods - Modification of motherboards, graphics cards, overclocking, etc.
External Mods - Modification to appearance through lighting, painting, remolding, recasing, etc.
Lighting Mods - If it emits a glow and its been changed then it qualifies so long as it is apple related.
Peripheral Mods - Modifications to mice, base stations, etc.
iPod Mods - Modifications to iPods
iPhone Mods - Modifications to iPhones
Software Mods - Modification at system level such as custom OS install, supporting unsupported hardware, etc.
Miscellaneous Mods - Anything from a robot controlled by a mac to a carputer system.
The dead line for submissions is by 11:59pm EST, August 31st.
Hereafter is an example of previous Mod Challenges:

No, this is not a Falcon Millenium... it is Mac Mini

During the Black Hat security convention, Robert Graham, CEO of errata security, demoed how to hack a Gmail session and read victim's email. He then even went further in its demonstration by hacking a journalist's Gmail account and using it to send "greeting email" to other journalists attending the convention. To achieve such exploit, Robert Graham was using a "home-made" application, called Hamster, to sniff data packets from the open convention wireless network. He did not need any account or passwords, only the IP address is required to perform such action on almost any cookie-based webmail applications (Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail). Of course when using SSL or encrypted wireless network, such action can not take place, but this demonstration shows how unsecured it is to run webmail on open wireless network; especially considering that Hamster will be released within the new few days.
More or less at the same, the good old rumor of a Google phone being developed was brought back to the scene by many IT-news websites. The original source seems to be from the rather serious business newspaper, the Walt Street Journal. In an article, the journalist reports that Google is currently discussing with phone carriers in order to develop a Google phone based on ad-supported system and providing the usual Google services.
Google might not be targeting directly the iPhone or mobile phone carriers, but rather the quickly growing advertising market for mobile phones. After invading the internet, and more recently the newspaper and magazine ads market, Google might be preparing to take control of mobile phone ads business expected to massively grow in 2008.