News for Tuesday, 23 September 2008

As we reported it yesterday, we now have collected additional information about the location for the second Apple Store in France. The store will be located at the cross between Halévy street and Meyerbeer street. It will feature 3 floors composed of a basement, ground floor and a large mezzanine. A large glass front bay will be created as in much physical Apple Store in order to provide a more natural light in the shop.
The project is now designed and finalized, only waiting for an agreement from the local authorities, especially the administration dealing with historical building preservation
The building is the following:

On the other side of the street is the Opera Garnier

And couple of meter away is the prestigious shop center Galeries Lafayette:

The building was previously hosting a bank, and features beautiful windows and front side, so to avoid any problem with the administration, so Apple will have to preserve most of the historical “caché” to avoid having problems with the local authorities. In addition it will be prestigious location and environment for this French Apple Store: having a modern design and preserving historical building, as illustrated in Regent Street Apple Store in London, can be synonym.

Acer, at the time of its annual conference, announced its intention to change its production of monitors from the format of 16:10 to the 16:9. The goal is to get convergence between televisions and computers, and more probably to try to take some market share of the small-size HD television sets.
Many manufacturers of LCD screens started to mass produce products in this format, and certain laptops have already adopted it. We should know in the near future if this tendency will spread as it was the case when passing from the 4:3 to the 16:10 or if the two will coexist.
PS: If Apple really decides to propose Blu-ray to its range, for example for the Mac Pro, they will have to update their monitors so they are finally compatible with standard HDCP. They are currently the last products of this type still on sale that are not compatible.

A user playing with the IR function of its camcorder spotted a DataMatrix code in the back of an iPhone.

While we currently ignore its function, one can think it would be used to perform some check up and/or selection during production (as it also features the IMEI and SSID codes), or for Apple Care to get manufacturing information on an iPhone refusing to switch on.

As expected, Intel officially launched its Dual Core ATOM. In fact, it is two ATOM CPU located on the same die, and not really a CPU composed of 2 cores. So data exchange between both cores will take place through the bus and the chipset, not optimal performance-wise, but fast enough for most devices hosting such CPU. Intel does not want the Dual Core ATOM to compete with any of its Core 2 Duo.
It remains unclear if Apple plans to use such CPU in a short- or mid-term future. It could find its place in the new Apple TV or in a new device designed to be between the iPhone and the MacBook.

If one really needed additional proofs demonstrating that Microsoft has trouble imposing Vista as the new and main OS for PC, the figures published by Xiti should definitely convince them. Indeed, Vista 18 months after its launch did not capture more than 20 % of the market share, while Windows XP owns 71 %, 4 % for Mac OS and less than 1 % for Linux. If Windows is still running on most computers worldwide, Microsoft can not capture additional market shares (even losing some), and can not convince XP users to switch to Vista.

XBMC media center was originally developed for the Xbox. Under the name of XBMC Atlantis beta 1, it is now available for Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5), and can even be installed on the Apple TV. On the latest it further increases the number of supported multimedia format, such as the DivX.
For additional information, please visit: http://www.xbmc.org and the Mac-dedicated FAQ

LaCie and Intego announce a new and interesting partnership: all LaCie HD will now ship bundle with Intego Backup Assistant for models dedicated to customer market, and Backup Manager Pro for models targeting Pro market. Both software are derived from Intego Personal Backup X5.
In the future such bundled products should become more common, as margins on the HD market are rather small, and competition high, all HD manufacturers have now their own external storage solutions, and designers of external models such as LaCie have to find other innovations to maintain their leadership.
Another factor should also be considered too. While FireWire and USB2 require a dedicated printed circuit/controller for being used in an external enclosure, the eSATA (external SATA) format does not. So, performance level will not be linked to a defined bridge, but only defined by the performance of the HD itself. So, one only needs to get a power adaptor in the box. Of course, for the time being, external HDs still feature FireWire, USB2 and eSATA, but in the future we could get only eSATA external drive, and manufacturers will have to come up with new innovations to offer a product able to come out from the mass, such as power adaptor, design, bundled software, cooling system...