News for Wednesday, 14 May 2008

While it was impossible to order an iPhone for about a week via Orange or Apple Store France websites, it seems that the shortage has ended.
Orange is now accepting order, and might have large stock of the device for both its online and physical shops. So, is ti iPhone rev1 or already the rev2 that will only ship early June?

The Swiss Mac website www.macprime.ch, and some of our readers, reports that Swisscom officially announced the future launch of the iPhone in Switzerland:

As shown on the screenshot, there is no official date yet, but one can register to get personally informed.
However, there are currently 45,000 iPhones being used on Swiss carriers' networks, 25,000 belong to Swisscom customers, while 10,000 are from Orange's subscribers and 7,000 from Sunrise accounts.
So, if the iPhone is not officially available in Switzerland, those figures indicate clearly that iPhone fans and users did not wait for Apple to react and change its business plan to make this mobile phone available in more countries than the 4 official ones: USA, UK, Germany and France.

A reader working at an Apple approved center of maintenance informed us that they too often have to replace the Seagate disks of MacBooks.
It is certainly the famous series to the firmware 7.0.1 that has such an alarming failure rate.
Until now, neither Seagate, nor Apple who installed a good number of these disks communicated officially on this subject.
It should be said that manufacturer of disks and of computers cannot be held responsible for any loss of data, even though, in this case, it is foreseeable.
We use this opportunity to remind everyone. Back up your data as often as necessary. The frequency of these backups must be driven by only one factor, the amount of data you are ready to lose in the event of sudden breakdown.

It isn't a secret for anybody; AMD is in a very bad shape and loses money quarter after quarter. Currently there is much talk about a major reorganization of the company which could be divided into several entities, separating the R&D division from the production.
AMD may have indeed decided to delegate part of the production of its products to TSMC, one of the two large make-to-order chipmakers. Such a step is underlines the crisis. AMD has many problems to produce chips in 45nm and should devote to it still more money, and we do not speak about the 32 nm.
However, TSMC, where manufacturing is the core activity, invests considerable sums to improve its manufacturing processes. On the short term, AMD could thus leave the red, especially as they benefit from by reselling some CPU manufacturing plants which they will no longer need.
It will be possibly always at some time in the future to restart their own manufacture of processors. But this is not certain, knowing that each new jump towards the quantum barrier is much more expensive than the precedent.

Greenhouse has announced new SSD disks for portables that they describe as the fastest in the industry.
Proposed with the format 2,5" and 9,5 mm height with the standard SATA interface (they can thus be fitted in the MacBook and MacBook Pro), they will be sold in capacities going from 16 to 64 GB with (faster) SLC memory and from 16 to 128 GB with MLC memory.
The data flow with SLC will be of 130 MB/s for reading and 67 MB/s for writing. The read speed with MLC remains excellent, however the write speed is quite slow, at 20 MB/s.
But of course, their claims regarding speed relates here only to the read speed…
The future could belong to the hybrid discs which certain manufacturers intend to produce. They would integrate a small portion of SLC memory, with the majority using MLC. These would keep the advantage of capacity of MLC while keeping the write speed of the SLC which would serve then as large cache for writing.

Even though the thing was hardly in doubt, it is now official. Steve Jobs will make the inaugural keynote with the WWDC 2008, on June 9.
Knowing that he does not make public presentations more than twice a year, we await the many announcements that he could pull out of his hat.
We know that the essence of announcements will be based on the iPhone, the grand star of this 2008 session, but he will certainly announce other surprising and unexpected things; this is the nature of the show.

Microsoft refuses to communicate the number of Office Mac sold, however the company is said to be very satisfied in the way in which its latest version that has beaten all the records for 19 years of existence of its Mac division.
Compared with the sales of Office 2004, version 2008 is selling at a rate 3 times higher.
These excellent figures are certainly not strange given the current great form of Apple. The fact that a family version is also proposed is certainly a help as well.