News for Thursday, 22 May 2008

Orange has officially announced that they will keep their exclusive contract for the next model of the iPhone, as was implied by the rumour that says they have signed a contract with Apple until 2011.
It is really a pity, because due to the lack of competition, even though competition hardly exists in France, they will not have any reason to reduce the subscription tariff associated with the device.
No information was given on a possible change of the economic model by proposing, for example, a subsidy applied towards purchase of the iPhone.

The FNAC is the French giant for consumer electronic shops, with several stores also open in key European countries. According to our information, the FNAC could have signed up an Agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone 2 in its shop network. It remains unclear if such move from Cupertino comes to cool down the legal fight initiated by the FNAC to get the right to sell the iPhone (here and here), but it seems that the FNAC is already actively preparing the launch of the iPhone 3G. The Apple Premium Resellers should also be granted to sell the iPhone 3G under conditions we do not fully know yet, but still linked to the exclusive Orange partnership apparently.
In both cases, it is quite normal that shops selling Apple hardware and software could also offer the iPhone in addition to the iPods as it will most likely be an excellent way to make consumers better know the Mac and Mac OS X.
So, starting from June one will be able to get the iPhone from other retailers than from the Apple and Orange Stores, and one can expect a strong impact of sales.

Looking for an Apple Store being built? Then you should search for the "black box", below is the one covering the entrance of the future Apple Store in Geneva:

Except if you have the key, no chance to know what is inside.
Thanks to the blog www.dbmacity.com we could get our hands on the map of the future Apple Store. There is nothing highly confidential to be revealed, but we could not resist sharing them with you.


As in most currently running Apple Stores, the first floor will feature a mezzanine to increase the space volume. If you are interested we have loaded an archive containing the high-resolution version of these maps: plans.zip
Unfortunately we do not have similar information about the future French Apple Store; the only news would then be that at least one should open its doors before one year...

According to vr Zone, Intel will launch new Xeon CPUs, code name Dunnington, in Q3 2008.

Those CPUs will be the first one from Intel to feature 6 cores. While being based on Penryn architecture, they will not be compatible with the motherboard and socket used in the Mac Pro (x7xxx series, while Apple uses x5xxx Xeon). While the TDP is unknown, the high-end model will sport 16 MB cache, its 6-core unit will be clocked at 2.66GHz for a rather premium price of 2729 USD.
For our Mac Pro, 8-core Xeon CPU, based on the Nehalem architecture, should arrive before the end of the year, making a potential upgrade of Apple Pro desktop for the end of 2008, beginning of 2009.

Japanese researchers have developed optical disks made of paper.
With a thickness of only 0,1 mm they have the advantage over the polycarbonate discs, which cannot spin faster than 10000 rpm without risking disintegration of the disk, they can reach, without problem, a speed of 15000 rpm, and could thus offer data flows for reading reaching of 250 Mbits/s. This is equivalent to 7x Blu-ray.
The originators of this product hope to see it replacing the long term backup system based on magnetic tapes usually used for this.
Tomorrow, the cinemas could receive new films to be projected in a simple envelope…

Thanks to the EEE PC which has already sold 700.000 devices, added to the 1,4 million traditional portables sold during the first quarter, ASUS succeeded in pushing Apple down to sixth place of manufacturers of laptops.
Success of this bottom-of-the-range computer with its rock bottom price is such that all manufacturers of portable PC are rushing to this segment so that they are not left behind in the rankings.
When one sees the lack of spirit of Apple to update the Mac mini, its only entry level product one can strongly doubt that they are following this tendency, preferring to confine themselves to the more expensive line and generating products with much better margins.