News for Wednesday, 29 October 2008

XLR8yourmac reports a problem which might affect recently released 1.5 TB Seagate HD. It seems that micro power cuts have been identified on such HDs when playing audio or video tracks. It happens with HD installed internally in Mac Pro or in an external enclosure. More intriguingly, it does not affect all Mac Pro models.
While waiting for a fix, it seems that inactivating journalizing might be a solution. A future firmware update should fix this bug which might reduce the HD lifetime.

If there is field not affected by the current crisis, it is the market for iPhone applications. One only needs to look at the number of applications added every day on the AppStore and their increasing quality. It shows that developers have a better control of the tools made available by Apple.
According to oDesk, a specific service recruiting freelance developers, number of requests for project on the iPhone platform jumped by 500 %, and now represents over 140 new projects every month. If most of the early developers came form the Mac ecosystem, new comers are joining too, and it will further increase the interest for the iPhone platform.
Beside developers, the other winner is Apple, as having developers rushing to bring their applications to the Mac illustrate the growth of the market, the rational of having an AppStore, and how such huge number of applications already available will further support the iPhone growth and its market on the long-term.

Most SSD manufacturers made the choice of MLC memory chips for their models, as it allows them to pile chips and reach high-density device, and subsequently larger storage capacity, at the cost of performance and lifetime. This choice was also defined by much higher cost of high performance SLC memory chips, not compatible with SDD targeting the consumer electronics mass market.
It might however change in the future as Toshiba just announced that it will launch SLC memory chips engraved at 43 nm for Q1 2009. With such thin engraving technology, capacity might reach 8 GB per chips. Even though it will remain less than the storage space allowed by MLC chips, but one could reasonably design a SLC-based SSD offering 128 GB with high speed high performance level of hundreds of MB/s in both reading and writing models. Such models will of course be expensive but might offer opportunities to offer SDD+HD-based notebook.

For the first time in the history of the PC, the laptops passed in front of the office machines. In the third quarter, 2008, they accounted for 55,2% of the sales with 9,5 million machines, that is to say a growth of 20% year on year.
It should be said that the portables are not any more supplemental products; they now have power, an equivalent memory and amply sufficient capacities of hard drives to make them complete and principal machines.
This new tendency is without any doubt excellent news for Apple which always has had an excellent market share in this sector since some years (they had 20% of this market in September).
In this context one also understands why NVidia made so much effort with its Geforce 9400 to come out on top in this segment; this is important in an industry that, as with the rest of the economy, will live through a difficult period.

Microsoft continues its forced march to bring out its next variation of Windows (Windows 7) as soon as possible. This has a heavy role to play since it has to take the place Vista that failed to convince the general public.
One now starts to know a little more about the system, but in fact, much less than what Microsoft did in the past. They now seem to want to play with secrecy and not to reveal information on what it will be able to do.
It is known now that this system, in the vein of Snow Leopard should be able to draw on the graphics processors so as to accelerate certain calculations. In an ideal world, Microsoft would take the train of the Open CL that Apple tries to impose as an open standard. But we are ready to bet that this acceleration will be supported by an API of Microsoft, a kind of Direct X adapted with the sauce GPGPU.
It will be interesting to follow the battle between Snow Leopard and this new Windows. Both are supposed to want to be based on a new bases, which will then be further updated as the OS in our machines in the next years. It will, not only be necessary to take up the challenge of acceleration using GPGPU, but especially, to manage with the maximum effectiveness the multiplication of the cores that marketing at Intel brings to the top, since this is the only means of not falling behind Moore's Law.
It is certain that it will not be a small matter for the two giants (funny to say that of Apple now).