Friday July 04, 2008
- New AMD/ATI Radeon Pushes NVidia to Cut its Price - Lionel - 16:01:49
It only launched a few weeks ago, but the performance level as well as the low price scale defined by AMD/ATI on the Radeon HD 4800 series have captured market share and forced NVidia to reduce the price its top-end GeForce GTX 280 graphics card.
We already reported that the Radeon HD 4800 is probably the best performance/price graphic card currently available, and we also complained that Apple did not make it possible for Mc users to get more freedom and install recent top-notch models in our Mac Pro. Considering that Radeon drivers are usually better than NVidia drivers on our Mac, it really make sense to quickly get a Radeon HD 4800 Mac Edition.
[translation by Linathael]
- Apple Already Shipped Mobile.me Package - Lionel - 14:16:47
With time, Apple stopped doing some mistake, such as posting specifications of future products on its website prior official announcement. However, some Mobile.me package have been shipped and delivered in advance to some customers
Once the mistake was spotted, Apple immediately contacted lucky customers to get the package back; however, it is not know if all customers agreed.
[translation by Linathael]
- Towards a Merger between Yahoo and AOL? - Lionel - 14:16:21
According to an article from the Wall street journal, Yahoo is pursuing talks with potential partners despite the failure of the previous bid from Microsoft. Probably to decide about its future, rather than being swallowed by one of those big sharks, Yahoo has decided to be pro-active, and look for a potential partner in order to reach the critical mass that will make them safe from unfriendly offer. Even though talks are just starting between Time Warner's AOL and Yahoo, the goal might really be to avoid being acquired by Microsoft, News Corp or even Google.
[translation by Linathael]
- NVidia Shipped Defect GPUs - Eric - 14:14:52
Yesterday, NVidia acknowledged to have dedicated 150 to 200 millions UDS to cover problems and issues that could appear with some batch of notebook GPUs. It seems to be a defect in a material which will prevent GPU to properly manage increases of temperature. When solicited, the GPU will heat more than usual and the defect material will make the internal overheating protection aiming to switch-off the GPU to preserve it ineffective. As a consequence, notebook owners featuring such defective GPU could experience some non recoverable failure of their graphic unit if they use it intensively enough to make the GPU warming up over the limit. As cooling system in notebooks are designed to only start at the last minute to save battery life, one way to prevent destroying such GPU would then be to modify the firmware to maintain its temperature below the critical limit. NVidia would be working with its partner to get it done. Of course, this will increase the noise as well as reducing the battery life span of the notebook. If Apple received batches of such defective GPU, and we should get SMC updates in the coming days for MacBook Pro and/or iMac featuring the cursed GPU. Let's hope that none of Mac hardware is using such GPU, which remains unknown as NVidia refuse to make it public, but we can imagine that it could be the GF 8800 M...
- $500 less for the MacBook Air SSD - Lionel - 07:42:22
Source : Appleinsider
It is the time of the sales at Apple, all at least for the MacBook Air SSD which had a cut in price at the US Apple Store of $500, which is enormous.This fall is due to a drop of $400 on the price of the SSD which has been lowered by this amount when selected in option and of $100 on the cost of upgrading the processor 1,6 GHz to one of 1,8 GHz.
The MacBook Air should continue to evolve, at least to pass from an interface ATA to the SATA for its hard drive. Indeed, apart from Apple, nobody proposes any more SSD disks equipped with this interface.
The European Apple Store European has not updated yet, but the fall should be same figures, but in Euros including all taxes.
[update] The MBA is now cheaper too from EU Apple Stores.
[translation by crispin]
- Firmware 2.0 and iTunes 7.7 shown on the web - Lionel - 07:28:53
Definitely, it is quite difficult for Apple to keep a secret.
Gizmodo published a video showing the use of firmware 2.0 on the iPhone and of screen captures of iTunes 7.7.
One sees there the scientific calculator, and more interesting, the advanced functions of parental control in iTunes allowing one to limit the access of children to some vidéos or games.
Gizmodo
[translation by crispin]
