Wednesday March 05, 2008

- Steve answers shareholders' questions - Lionel - 18:24:42

Source : Apple Insider

Apple has held its annual shareholder meeting yesterday, and Steve Jobs was present to answer to some questions of the audience. The amount of answers was unusual high this year, here are some remarkable notes of interest:
- When questionned about the future of videogaming on the Mac, Steve referred to EA's Windows games being ported via Cider (which does not offer many games yet). He also referred to World of Warcraft, and the iPhone SDK, an SDK that will also allow developers to create games for the iPhone.
- When asked about a future successor of Jobs as CEO of the company, he answered that the company's got lots of internal talent, with many possible successors.
- Apple still thinks it'll reach its goal of 10 M iPhones at the end of this year. The only thing said about the unlocked iPhones, was that they still gain money on unlocked iPhones too.
- Investors also wanted to know what Apple's plans are with the $18 billion in cash, whether they are planning to invest them etc. - the answer was negative, which will certainly have pleased them...

This is only a brief summary of the questionning-answering game they played there.
Too bad that nobody has asked the date for when the 8800 GT cards would become available for the Mac Pro Rev 1, or whether Apple would extend its warranty-period to 2 years.
But these were 2 questions that were of no interest to the shareholders.

[translation by xavier]

- Pioneer wants to get out of the Plasma screen market - Lionel - 17:18:48

Pioneer has been a pioneer of the Plasma technology and holds a number of patents which were valuable and allowed them to make the best screens. However economic realities change the picture; the price of screens has fallen very quickly and the LCD continue to eat into market of screens.
The company must shortly announce the closure of its factories. It will, in future, buy screens from Matsushita and later, will market televisions with LCD screens bought from Sharp
During the last years, Pioneer has also abandoned the market of DVD engravers where they also excelled at the beginning.

[translation by crispin]

- Seagate Unveils a new High-Performance HDs - Cheerful - 13:49:50

Source : Seagate

Seagate announced a new series of High-Performance HDs. entitled Cheetah 15K.6, it will spins at 15,000rpm, while all models will feature 16MB of cache and offer up to 450GB of storage space. they will be available in SAS or fiber channel format.
Seagate claims that such HD could reach 160MB/s transfer speed, while requiring less power thanks to new optimization.
Only the SAS version of those HDs could be used in Mac Pro or an XServe, but it will also need an additional RAID card.


[translation by Linathael]

- Apple Expo 2008 Officially Announced - Lionel - 12:32:14

If some people were predicting the end of the Apple Expo Paris with the last successful edition in September 2007, the official launch of the 2008 edition will probably stop those rumors:



To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Apple Expo, several changes have been made for the 2008 edition. Hereafter are some additional info:
- The event is renamed "Apple Expo Remix"
- The event will take place over 4 days, from September, Wednesday 17th to Saturday 20th.
- There will be a late session on Thursday night till 22h00.
- the event will take place at the usual location in Paris.

Apple will be there with a large booth (same size than last year); registration to the Apple Expo remix '08 should start in 2 months.


[translation by Linathael]

- MacBook Air: A Best-Seller? - Lionel - 12:24:03

Source : Dailytech

When the MacBook Air was released, several analysts were predicting that Apple will have problem to sell it due to the single USB, non replaceable battery and potentially its price.
As usual, those analysts failed once more with their forecasting, as the MacBook Air seems to be flying out from the shelves. Stocks are simply empty, and one has to go via pre-order procedure, even the SSD-sporting MacBook Air model is not staying for a long time on the shelves.
Even if Apple did not launch a mass production scale for the MacBook Air, those information indicate that the thinnest mobile computer on earth is selling better than expected by Cupertino and by some analysts.


[translation by Linathael]