Thursday July 17, 2008
- The Big Losers of the day are the APRs - Lionel - 19:12:29
Although the day has been excellent for Orange and the major retailers selling the iPhone, the biggest losers of the day have been the Apple Premium Resellers who, unlike in a number of other countries, have not had the right to sell it from the date of its release.
We're unaware of what will ultimately happen in our country, but this absence risks putting the relationship between Apple and it's "privileged" resellers a little more on edge.
[translation by jwa]
- 2.54 Million Macs in the 3rd Quarter? - Lionel - 18:29:40
According to Apple Insider, Apple will have surpassed 2.54 million Macs sold during the previous fiscal quarter, besting its previous record.
It is apparent that the company remains very dependant upon the American market which represents the majority of its sales. This new score raises Apple to third place in the market, something inconceivable two years ago.
It is perhaps time for its European subsidiary to really get back to work on communication and seduction.
Currently, all that is heard about the Mac happens in the United States, our continent is content to follow from afar.
[translation by jwa]
- A Chips to Control them All - Eric - 13:29:10
An Israeli Start-Up, Lucid Logic Technologies claims to have designed a chips able to distribute processing load over multi GPU cores in a real-time manner. The company claims that its new parallel graphics technology that will allow PC manufacturers to satisfy constantly growing consumer demand for visual reality.
The HYDRA engine combines a system-on-chip with exclusive software technologies that efficiently load-balances graphics processing tasks, delivering another industry breakthrough: near-linear to above-linear performance with two, three or more graphics cards. All together, the technology means people will be able to customize and tweak their PC to achieve the price, performance and power balance they want - whether it is a mainstream system or a high-performance gaming package.
As usual very broad and attractive claims, but let’s see how it will evolve in the near future, for sure, a chips that would be GPU, CPU, chipset and OS independent could be used straight into any computers, including Macs of course, it would be especially useful in Mac Pro.
- NVidia Denies Rumors of Faulty GPUs - Eric - 10:48:13
NVidia replied to question sent by Ars technica
and formally denied rumors of mass GPU failures as we previously reported about it. According to their claims, the G84 and G86 chips would not be affected by the weak die/packaging material issue, and the sudden death of notebooks would only happen in certain specific conditions, still to be unveiled. According to NVidia, it is very unlikely that a NVIDA based notebook product will be affected.In this story, and despite Ars Technica point of view, NVidia was not communicating enough to keep customers and IT websites informed about an on-going problem with GPU manufacturing and stability. One should remember that it originally started when NVidia filed a report to the SEC clearly stating that the company will budget 150 million to 200 million USD one-time charge to cover "anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems. All newly manufactured products and all products currently shipping in volume have a different and more robust material set." If the problem was only limited to specific cases, why putting aside such amount of money?
Of course we will learn more in the coming weeks and months, especially if computer manufacturers release firmware updates aiming to modify the cooling settings of the GPU to keep it cooler than originally expected, draining battery charge, and shortening both battery and notebook lifetime. Let's hope that at the end the customers do not have to pay. For sure in EU, most regulations will force all PC manufacturers to replace at no charge the faulty/defective computer as hidden defect has no warranty limits. At the end a mistake from NVidia might cost a lot to notebook manufacturers if they are too soft with the GPU manufacturer...
- A Flash Memory Module that Last a Century - Lionel - 10:44:03
Source : Dailytech
One of the main problem with current flash memory is the limited writing cycles of 10000. Indirectly reducing the long-term interest of SSD.Japanese scientists claim to have found a way to get a NAND flash memory module able to support 100 millions writing cycle, instead of 10000 currently for the MLC NAND. In addition, one could engraved such chips at 10-nm while reducing working voltage, and consequently saving power.
As usual, if this is a breakthrough, one will have to wait most probably years before seeing it integrated in consumer eletronic products.
[translation by Linathael]
- A "Cheap" 128 SSD Model - Lionel - 10:19:32
It seems that the price of SSD starts going down, probably due to the higher availability as well as competition between manufacturers. Ridata announced new series of 2.5" SSDs with storage capacity ranging from 32 to 128 GB. Performance levels are good with respectively 120 MB/s and 80 MB/s in reading and writing mode. And prices range from "ONLY" 168 USD for the 32 GB model to 540 USD for the 128 GB unit. It will soon be financially interesting to replace the SuperDrive by a SSD to get a second storage unit in a notebook, especially for system and applications.
[translation by Linathael]
- iPhone in France: Customers Already Queuing in the Streets - Lionel - 10:18:28
Six days after the other countries, the iPhone is launched in France, and the iPhone-mania will start too.
several customers are already queuing in front of the Orange shop located on the Champs Elysées (Thanks to Pierre-Henry for the photo). Let's hope that this shop has more than the average 12 iPhone units available per Orange shop as we have learned... It remains unclear if this is due to short supply by Apple, or a clear decision made by Orange to avoid having stocks...
All Orange shops open their doors at 8h00. FNAC and Darty (main consumer electronics distributors) will also have the iPhone in their respective shops today. At the end of the day, most consumers might not have to chance to get the expected iPhone due to the limited number of units available. It is maybe a way for Apple to push sales via the Apple Store...
All Orange shops will get from 11 to 16 iPhone units depending on their size and their location (except the flagship on the Champs Elysées). for 12 units, it will be the following:
- 8 iPhones 3G 8G (black)
- 2 iPhones 3G 16G White
- 2 iPhones 3G 16G Black
For sure Orange will most likely sale them all at the end of the day, and most probably before lunch time.
[update]
The queue is increasing with time, the shop is only opened for 2 hours…
[translation by Linathael]
- Orange iPhone Subscription Plans in Details - Lionel - 10:14:18
We obtained this information, couple of days ago, published it on the French website yesterday, and only today for all readers (to avoid having troubles with Orange). Hereafter are the details.
First, the price of the iPhone depending on the subscription plan.
Then, the cost of the switch from iPhone 2G to iPhone 3G for Orange customers already owing the first version of the iPhone (around 120000 customers). It is a 100 € cash back offer, and customers can keep the first version iPhone, one should find many of them on eBay soon.
And to conclude, the price of SIM-unlocking:
As usual, unlocking will cost 100 € during the first 6 month following the purchase, it will then be free afterwards.
[translation by Linathael]
- New hard disks from Toshiba - Lionel - 07:48:34
Source : Toshiba
Toshiba presented two new ranges of 2.5" hard drives.- The first, proposes disks equipped with platters of 200 GB and spinning at 5400 rpm. The spearhead of this range will be a disk of 400 GB equipped with 8 MB of cache and a thickness of 9,5mm. If this is not a record of capacity, it is for the density of the data.
- The second joined the competition of disks spinning at 7200 rpm with a maximum capacity of 320 GB and equipped with 16 MB of cache. According to Toshiba, these disks went through a very thorough optimization in order to push the performances to the maximum.
The price of these products is not yet known. They will be available in September.
[translation by crispin]
- Apple apologises for the poor transition to Mobile.me and offers an extra month - Lionel - 06:22:05
In an open letter addressed to its customers, Apple apologises for problems involved in the transition from .mac to Mobile.me.
To calm the grumbling which has started, they will offer to everyone a one month extension with their service.
This unprecedented commercial gesture should calm the majority of the dissatisfied,especially since now the situation has been resolved.
This extra month should appear on the accounts in the next few days.
Hereafter is the message sent to mobileMe Users:
We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.[translation by crispin]
Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.
Another snag we have run into is our use of the word "push" in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe "cloud," changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word "push" until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.
We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.
We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with these new web applications and your Mac or PC.
Thank you,
The MobileMe Team
