News for Thursday, 11 September 2008

A new rumour doing the rounds implies that new MacBook will be released on October 14.
It should inaugurate many innovations, thus a " Special Event" in the name of " Let' S Macbook" may take place.
On this occasion the MacBook should be dressed in Aluminium!
This event would be also a good time to launch the new MacBook Pro and also update of MacBook Air.
Just wait one more month!

iFixit has taken apart a new iPod Touch and discovered a new chip, the Broadman BCM4325.

This chip is used for Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g) and it also supports Bluetooth 2.1. Unfortunately Apple appears to have decided not to offer the option of using wireless headphones.
It is probable that Apple uses this chip to support Nike+iPod function that operates on the same frequency 2.4 GHz.

Many of you, on Mac or PC, have been playing the famous saga "Age of Empire" or "Age of Mythology", so keep those games as they are now history and collectors. Indeed, none of them will ever have a new Opus or add-on, as Microsoft decided to shut down the "Ensemble Studio" and reallocate resources to other project, as such game are not part of Microsoft strategy anymore. For sure, such strategy and thinking games might not be the best-seller for the Xbox 360, one need the brain-less shooting games...
Redmond's giant seems to be in trouble for its game division too and its inability to compete with Sony PS3 for the hardcore gamer market, and the Nintendo Wii for the game station dedicated to the family. If you add up relative failure of Vista and Zune, it indeed looks like a rather dark period.
Couple of months ago, the team behind “Halo” decided to leave Microsoft before getting fully swallowed and see their future not in their hands anymore. For sure a good decision that developers of Age of Empire might have thought about it.

One of our readers sent us part of its Orange telephone bill he just received after spending his holidays in New York:

More than 7000€! For sure it will not make help him to manage his budget for the back-to-school period. This story to remind you to inactivate some iPhone functions well going abroad and using roaming service with you mobile phone. Of course, Orange should better inform its customers of such dangers, and why not sending a SNS to warn them in case of abnormal charges on the account. So, remember to switch off the data option on your iPhone when going abroad, or be prepared for some serious bills.

So far an iPod Touch or an iPhone running firmware 2.0x could face some serious problem with application management. Beside crashes, one can also list:
- Never ending procedure to save a document on the handheld.
- Difficulties to perform updates directly from device on the AppStore.
- iTunes refuses installation of application for any reason.
The new firmware 2.1 seems indeed to fix most problems and it might well be the best update for most users, and you should get it as soon as it will become public on Friday. Apple probably decided to make it available at the end of the week to spread the server loads associated with such procedure over the week-end.

Over the last 12 months, Apple has been mostly successful with all its launched project, the release of Safari for Windows, might be the only relative failure, but it could also be due to the lack of test, as the first beta version was rather instable and bugged. When analyzing statistics of Macbidouille/Hardmac, Safari for Windows is the browser used by a bit more than 2% of our visitors, way behind FireFox Win (25%) while IE for Win still capture 15%.
A new comer already grabbed 3% of our PC visitors: Google Chrome, quite a successful start for a one week old browser! When looking at data, it is mostly IE users who moved to Chrome. It will be interesting to see how the Mac version of chrome will behave when Google will release it. On its side Arstechnica reports that 7% of its visitors are using Chrome.

There is no need to wait for it, it is now a done thing. A Class Action suit was set in motion in California. It aims at the problem of defective chips of which we still do not know (officially) much.
This case concerns all the customers who have bought such chips and seeks to obtain their replacement.
Alas, from an economic point of view, this is completely impossible. Potentially, 15 to 20 million Geforce chips are affected (unverifiable figure). At 200$ repair, one reaches a sum largely higher than the market capital of the company.
If the Class Action achieves its goals, NVidia will be forced to declare itself bankrupt.