News for Friday, 19 September 2008

OCZ announced a new price cut for its 64 GB SSD, now available for 99 USD after special discount. If one could be surprise, we are not. Recent tests performed by some websites, and as we reported it in a previous news, have shown that the OCZ was definitely not delivering the expected performance level. Due to a defective controller, performance drops significantly as soon as multitask request or working environment are being used.
So, this is an example of how consumers could be foul around by new products, so be careful.

After having fully disassembled a good old PowerBook 12" yesterday, today we will demo and record the procedure to replace the tiny 40 GB HD with 250 GB 2.5" PATA drive, to provide enough space for a large collection of movies.
The demo will take place live at 16h00 at our booth and the video will be available later (once fully edited and subtitled).
The new drive has been formatted for the Apple TV: http://www.hardmac.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2007-3-27

Whereas the current Blu-ray discs are satisfied with two layers, Pioneer recently announced to have succeeded in producing media which contain 20 layers, and thus to reach 500 GB and to see coming head to head with the holographic storage that promises much in term of capacity.
The technology used is very similar to that already present in the current devices. But it is too much to hope that a simple update of firmware is enough to support this high number of layers. It is more probable that the readers of the systems would need improving making it possible to focus precisely on a given layer and to limit the interferences related to the many adjacent layers.
Pionner hopes now to succeed in validating this technology by Blu-ray Disc association and make a standard for the future, when these capacities will have an outlet.

The latest analysis by Piper Jaffray estimates that the Apple production during the current quarter of nearly 11 million iPod and 8 million iPhones.
This is certainly only an estimate, but if it were confirmed, it would make it possible at Apple to beat new records, especially since other analyses imply that the sales of Mac will be also be highest over this period.
Who could have imagined that only 5 years ago?