News for Monday, 9 June 2008

The new iPhone is finally there loaded with plenty of new features including the most expected ones: 3G and GPS. Apple did not release the iPhone alone, and decided to make this new version of iPhone a more integrated one. Targeting the enterprise market, the new iPhone comes with Me.com (renamed Mac.com) as well as full Microsoft Exchange support to bring a the iPhone into corporates, not only as the last toy of an important executive, but as the default mobile phone for executives and managers (at first).


It is also clearly illustrated by Apple's statement:

What makes iPhone a great business phone?
Simple. The same features that make iPhone a revolutionary mobile device. And now with iPhone 2.0 software, iPhone does even more for your enterprise. It supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, delivering push email, calendar, and contacts. And it gives mobile users secure access to corporate resources with Cisco IPSec VPN and network services with WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1X authentication.

If you want to know more, and maybe about the price of the iPhone 3G in your country, check your local Apple Store

Dear readers, this post just to remind you to fire up your browsers today slightly before 10am PST (that's GMT-9, so for example it will be 6pm in London and 7pm in Paris) and point then to Hardmac.com, for our traditional live coverage of the Steve's WWDC 2008 Keynote.
As usual, we hope our servers will handle the load and won't collapse under the stare of so many eager readers. To follow the WWDC 2008 keynote please click on the following dedicated webpage:
http://keynote.hardmac.com/
Stay tuned!

Almost all analysts, as well as Mac-dedicated websites, agree that the new iPhone model could sign a new era for Apple, and Cupertino could sell dozen of millions units of the new device as it should bring the missing features identified in the first generation iPhone (such as GPS and 3G). In addition, the change in the iPhone business plan should massively extend the market of potential iPhone owners. Except in USA, UK, France and Germany were the exclusive partnership will be maintained (for how long?), in other countries, several carriers will offer the iPhone in their catalog and will probably fight to get new iPhone-driven subscribers thanks to phone+data offers. In addition, the price of the future iPhone should also drop significantly due to financing organized by carriers. All those facts could drive total iPhones sales way over initial Apple’s expectations, even for 2008.
There will of course be collateral damages, and beside other mobile phone manufacturers, the new iPhone will cannibalize part of the iPod markets, as the new handheld will include all iPod-like functions and features while bringing additional ones, among them being a mobile phone. The iPod touch might be the most affected model, and its price should drop massively, making entry-level models of iPod, iPod nano and iPod shuffle almost not viable, so we should not be surprised by a reorganization of the iPod offers, bringing more rationality and integrating the new and growing iPhone market.
If 2008 should be the year of the explosion of the iPhone market, it should also mark the end of the exponential growth of iPod sales. This would simply be the evolution of a market which appears to be massively evolving the way Apple decides it.

The WWDC to be delivered by Steve jobs in couple of hours will be for sure massively oriented towards the Mac and the iPhone, giving tools for developers to bring their applications to both hardware thanks to the power of Mac OSX Leopard on which all hardware models are running, including the iPhone. So we should be ready to hear about iPhone SDK 2.0, how great it is, how fun and easy it will be to use the iPhone application dedicated store, AppStore; as well as the new firmware 2.0 for the iPhone for both iPhone 1G and iPhone 2.0 3G. According to Tuaw, Apple might even release a "Mac Fusion", looking almost like the current Mac mini and dedicated to developers.
If one could imagine that such Mac Fusion will be offered to developers signing up for an ADC Premium, one can hardly imagine Apple restricting this machine only for such a limited pool of users. So, it could really well be the evolution of the Mac mini expected by most users. It will truly be if the Mac Fusion features a dedicated GPU and not a shared memory graphic chipset.
Last but not least, this could simply be a hoax, as many of similar photos are usually released within hours preceding any Steve jobs Keynote. But for sure if it turns true it would make us happy as we will have something else to talk about than the iPhone 3G.

It has been years that one talks about Wireless USB to allow connection to devices without any cable while offering massive data speed within a short range of couple of meters. If some peripheral prototypes have been demoed, the market remains inactive due to the lack of default support in computers. This could change in a near future as Realtek announced that it will provide Fujitsu with Wireless USB chips for some of its notebook models to be launched in 2008. If a large adoption is for sure not for tomorrow, one can easily imagine that a revised version of the MacBook Air will feature such system to boost its abilities to be connected to other peripherals. If the Wireless FireWire format is also finally taking off, we could then have notebooks featuring a broad range of connectivity without requiring any additional connector of wireless system.

According to NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Apple could introduce its graphics parallel processing technology based on NVidia's CUDA technology. during the WWDC. CUDA is a programming system allowing software developers to take advantage of the unique parallel processing characteristics of NVidia's GPUs, such as the GeForce 8600M currently found in the MacBook Pro. Such announcement does not come at first, as NVidia released a beta version of CUDA for Mac OS X back in February; so any announcement at the WWDC could indicate that Apple has adopted the technology in its hardware to boost GPU performance. According to Jen-Hsun Huang, Apple's implementation of CUDA will not be entitled accordingly, but will have a different name; it will most likely be the new booster for Core image and Core video.
If this information turns true it could also open up the doors of NVidia Tesla product to our Mac.

Tesla is a Pro-oriented solution, integrated in computer hardware or available as external units or even rack-mounted, which features several GPU. So, with software able to take advantage of CUDA, Tesla should be able to provide an unlimited hardware support. So, one could imagine a Mac Pro becoming the reference hardware associated to Tesla units for high-end Pro video editing, directly competing with third-party dedicated systems.

While Intel recently announced its goal to enter the high-end SSD market, targeting mostly Pro users at first, it recently unveiled its low cost entry-level offer. Such SSD units will feature 4 to 8 GB of storage space in SATA format. The main difference with other similar products will be the specifications: 25 MB/s only in reading mode, while writing speed will top at 7 MB/s. The half life of such SSD is expected to be around 3 years with a MTBF of 1 millions hours.
So, who could be interested by such products? Most likely integrators aiming to bring low-cost/low performance computer to the market, indeed, the main advantageous of such solutions is the price: 4 GB for 25 USD and 8 GB for 50 USD. With such price and specification, those SSD resembles more a USB key drive than a true SSD.

Two weeks ago, we reported about future plans of an Apple Store in Geneva. Thanks to Stefan, one of our readers, we can offer you some first pictures of the buildings:



And obviously, we're also going to keep you up to date about the upcomming Apple Store in the Carrousel du Louvre.