News for Thursday, 8 November 2007

Aigle4, one of our French forum members, decided to react quickly as soon as he could identify some liquid spots, prior a fatal leakiness will entirely destroy his PMG5. He fully disassembled not only his hardware but also the entire cooling system.


As illustrated on photos, crystal deposits originating from the cooling liquid are spread all over the place, even on the copper-based heatsink designed to improve thermal exchange. Remember that the PMG5 was still fully functional.
He decided to clean, fix and even optimized the water block, if you are interested you can follow the procedure (in French) : here
According to our sources, Apple might be on tract to acknowledge the problem and launch a replacement program, but unlucky PMG5 owners should maintain the pressure on Cupertino and not hesitate to report their on-going procedure or complains to us.

Elpida announced to have successfully manufactured 1Gbit DDR2 chips, doubling the standard capacity of this component. Such achievement was made possible thanks to a thinner engraving at 65nm. Such chips should be massively used from beginning of next year to offer modules with higher density, or cheaper as requiring fewer components.
It should also allow Elpida to cut its manufacturing cost/Mbit, and subsequently increase its margin in a difficult market since Windows Vista launch.

Last Friday, we were reporting about a TechNote published by Apple and describing some 3D rendering artifacts which could appear after making heavy requests to the GM 3100, the integrated graphic chipset of the new MacBook.
While the TechNote was supposed to be updated as soon as Apple would find a fix, it was simply erased from Apple support website without any notice! So, two possibilities:
- Apple could fix the problem on selected MacBook before their shipment.
- Apple did not like our news about this 3D rendering problem, and simply decided to delete the related TechNote.
In both cases, it would have been smarter to openly communicate, instead of maintaining users and potential consumers in doubts about a potential issue.

Last week, some resellers were emptying their stocks of "End-of-life" Toshiba HD-DVD players HD-A2 by selling them for US$99.99. For Toshiba it was also an excellent marketing campaign as the stock of 90,000 units were gone in couple of days, and the market share of HD-DVD player dramatically increased.
Some consumers were even luckier, as they could get the new Toshiba HD-DVD player HD-A3 for the price of the discontinued model, as their purchase could not be honored. This success demonstrates that consumers are ready to invest in HD video players, and even make the choice of one format vs. the other one, if price of players are low enough to compensate a potential mistake on the future winning HD video format.

The first update of Leopard was provided to the developers today. We await with great anticipation for the corrections ...
The applications concerned:
- AirPort
- Back To My Mac
- Hello
- DiskImages
- Disk Utility
- FileVault
- Finder
- Firewall
- Graphics & Games
- iCal
- Keychain Access
- Mall
- Networking
- QuickDraw
- Time Machine
- Windows Spins Sharing
The details:
- Sync Mall
- HTML anchors in Mall
- PubSub headers in installhdrs
- Parental Controls corruption in certain situations
- Fix to SpotlightIndex
- Disk Management and free space records
- iCal and CalDAV syncing
- Mall Sync and Smart Mailboxes
- email alarms and iCal
- Text drawing corruption and QuickDraw Manager
- Disk Management and RAID
- Keychain login fix
- Custom presets with Page Setup and Print Dialogs
- Read-Only exit with SMB
- AirPort 802.1X resulting
- DesktopServices and moving files across partition
- Fix to Application Firewall
- To-C Notes and Smart Mailboxes