News for Friday, 5 October 2007

Several iMac Alu owners have experienced a problem following installation of the last Radeon HD 2600 drivers. The affected iMacs simply "freeze". Apple officially acknowledges the problem and is working hard to release a fix as early as possible.
This is probably the worst period ever since the Apple II, regarding stability and reliability of Apple updates (including firmware, software and hardware updates). It seems that due to the large number of different hardware model based on different CPU and chipsets, Apple has problem to release universal updates, and so should maybe choose to provide model-dedicated updates to avoid those bugs mostly linked to incompatibility between hardware and software.

Following yesterday's news about problems faced by many users following installation of the EFI firmware, we received many reports confirming that it affects USB peripherals. In some cases, it affects only the time required for detecting plugged USB peripherals (USB external HD taking long time to mount, same for USB key), in other cases, all system resources seem to be devoted to the USB peripheral, leading to a "freeze-like" syndrome.
We can not conclude if it affects all type of USB peripherals, nor why syndromes are differents from one users to the other, but Apple should definitely better test updates before releasing them, as it will required new update to fix previously generated bugs. Mac users might delay applying updates in the future if such process resembles too much the Russian roulette.

Some analysts decided to leave their golden offices from which they usually deliver projections and expectations based on investor meeting organized by companies. So, to better understand the iPhone business, how and who purchase this device, analysts from Piper Jaffray Group decided to stand by Apple Stores to better perform their study.
They noticed that many customers were purchasing 5 iPhone units at once, the maximal amount allowed by Apple. They then concluded that such units will most likely been SIM unlocked and/or feed the grey market. They think that up to 10% of iPhone sales are dedicated to this grey market or to be used with another carrier than AT&T.
This is a quite important number considering the fact that those users will have to update their iPhone with new hacks every time Apple released a firmware update.
They also tried to evaluate how the recent US$200 price cut impacted sales of iPhone, and estimated an increase of 56%! But it could also be linked to the availability of SIM unlocking solutions too.

In order to offer a strong competitor to current HD-DVD standalone players, SONY announce the availability of an aggressively priced PlayStation 3: 399€. This model will be in your shop as soon as October 13th.
To obtain such a reduced price, this PS3 will come without bundled games, and with only one game controller, and will sports a 40GB HD. With such offer, SONY expect to attract customers looking for an affordable BD player, but also gamers who did not purchase the PS3 yet due to its original high price tag.

Now that the HD-DVD format officially exists in 3 layers, the proponents of Blu-ray are fighting back with technological demonstrations of multi-layered Blu-ray disks.
Hitachi recently showed Blu-ray disks containing 4 and 8 layers for capacities of 100 and 200 GB at an event in Japan.
Although systems for reading 100 GB disks seem almost ready, those destined for 200 GB disks are experiencing further technical difficulties. Indeed, the more layers there are, the more difficulty there is in focusing the laser so that it reads the proper layer without interference from the others.