News for Monday, 10 March 2008

When we ordered a Time Capsule, we chose the 500 GB model, since this was sufficient and also less expensive than the 1 TB. However we had in mind that as the price of large disks came down, we would one day change the disk for a larger one.
This day came early since the hard disk in our 500 MB was unacceptably noisy. We replaced the noisy Seagate 500 MB hard disk with a much more discrete Western Digital 1 TB Green Power disk.
To follow our installation procedure (somewhat easy) see this article:Changing a disk in the Time Capsule
[Update] Not all Time CApsules are noisy; Apple certainly uses several different manufacturers - they are not all Seagates.

After the difficult Pentium 4 era, Intel has experienced a renaissance with the Core processor architecture, an era which corresponds to the migration of Apple to their architectures. Since Core, the company has rolled all over the competition. Transmeta threw in the towel, AMD keeps posting losses, and VIA now fears its processors will be subject to competition from Intel's ultra-low-power platform, ATOM. While this competition causes a problem of staying afloat and not losing a fortune by selling its processors at a loss, Intel continues its forced march towards innovation. In two years, they have rapidly decreased their engraving from 90nm to 65 and are now manufacturing at 45nm, meanwhile AMD has not even begun to produce mass qualitities of processors this size. The figures speak for themselves. Intel, today, produces 100,000 45nm CPUs every day! By the third quarter, more than half of their production will be this size. Obviously, this advance does not suffice. Now that this production technique is developed, they focus their next radically different architecture, Nehalem, which is expected in only a few months, aiming to breach 32nm in the course of 2009.
Intel seems to want to seek technical KO and, with it, sees limited competition for a long time, giving them the opportunity to broaden their horizons. Their next targets are the manufacturers of high-performance video cards. Intel has settled on this market with its Larrabee products - expected to arrive at the end of the decade - with an similar approach to their CPU line: multiple cores.
They will not offer graphics chips as we know them today, but video processors containing a multitude of cores and a huge memory bandwidth. The concept is attractive, because if the foundations are sound, it would be very easy to change by increasing people's cores, then chips on the graphics cards.
It should now be asked who can stop them. The only way to counteract the future is no longer fight on the same field, but to revolutionize the very concept of processor in a profound sense. The Power PC could have at one time claimed that status, but it failed. With further evolution, the Cell could claim this title, but it would take an enormous amount of work to adapt it to operate effectively in computers, and certainly won't be seen in the near future.
One thing is certain in light of Intel's healthy existence: if Apple had not jumped on their train, the Mac would have been left in the dust.

As we reported it earlier, Apple has finally released the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Firmware update, supposed to help some Mac Pro owners to fix some freezing issues:

About ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Firmware Update
This update is for Mac Pro computers with one or more ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards installed, running Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later with the Leopard Graphics Update.
It updates the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card firmware on all of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards in the Mac Pro to improve system stability.

For additional information, please visit: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/atiradeonhd2600xtfirmwareupdate.html

Surfing on the success of its Eee PC, Asus decided to apply the same concept for desktop.

The unit will be powered by single or dual core CPU clocked at 1.87GHz and will be using a 2.5" HD. The entry-level model will have a price tag below 200USD. Most of the hardware will be based on Intel solution (CPU, but also shared memory graphic unit, etc.).
On Apple's side, the Mac mini is still available on the Store, probably because it is still selling well, despite the fact it did not evolve in parallel to others hardware models currently available on the Apple Store. Some rumors keep spreading about the mac mini being a model designed and manufactured to make some share holders happy with an Apple-branded entry-level computer model; but margins are probably much more interesting for Cupertino with macBook, iMac or even the Apple TV.

After years of legal battles, Paul McCartney could have agreed on a contract allowing iTunes Store to offer all Beatles’s song catalog.
To obtain such exclusive partnership, Apple might have signed a big check: 600 millions USD, without counting the revenues generated by future cong/album sales.
It remains unclear when the Beatles’s albums will be available on the iTunes Store, but it will for sure take years for Apple to get money back on this investment.

Intel will release for Q3 2008 its first Quad Core CPU dedicated to the portable computer. The Core 2 Extreme QX9300 will be clocked at 2.53GHz and feature a 1066MHz FSB and 12MB of cache L3 in total.
The predicted TDP will be higher than the usual 20-25W, and could reach 45W. If it is for sure too much for a true notebook, it might well fit in an iMac, or in those Alienware-type of PC models.
For the iMac it will for sure remain a BTO as the price of this CPU/unit is 1038USD (public price /unit for 1000 unit order).