News for Thursday, 6 November 2008

Someone has succeeded to get a Palm keyboard to work with an iPhone.

To install a driver it will be necessary to jailbreak the device.
Beyond the anecdotic side of this exploit, one can ask whether in the future things will be made to attach to the iPhone. Knowing that they are pushing for more and more power, one could easily imagine that Apple one day will propose a dock, not for a laptop, but a dock for a iPhone in order to work with a larger screen and a keyboard.
After all, the PC market is now seeing the laptops, considered only few years ago as secondary machines, to take the lead from the office machines.
In this context, it is not absurd to imagine that our telephones will become our secondary machines (that already started) and that one one day, via some adaptation, we should be able to use them as complete computers.
While going even further, one returns from there to the dream of some that imagines that one can place a iPhone in a laptop and use it as an intelligent trackpad. It would then exceed this function to become the center of the machine.

The buzz was ignited by Apple spokesman Bill Evans who told Macworld: “Our holiday line-up is set”. In summary, do not expect new products before the next MacWorld in January in San Francisco. If this was expected for the Mac Pro, as Intel did not release any Xeon Nehalem yet, many Mac-dedicated websites were expecting to get the current iMac models updated.
However, when thinking twice, and looking at the current and future hardware evolutions and mobile architectures, it perfectly makes sense of NOT updating now the iMacs. Yes, Apple could install the same NVidia chipset used in new MacBook models. However, it would not be interesting performance wise, despite bringing NVidia 9600 GT GPU in our iMac. Indeed, the current Centrino architecture in our iMac does not require as a desktop to be improved for offering enhanced power management.
Below are some reasons why apple will wait longer before updating the iMac:
- As the iMac is a desktop no need to improve power consumption as for the MacBooks
- The GeForce 9400M, while being faster than the Intel GMA, would not be able to compete with the current entry level Radeon offered in our iMac.
- Having 2 GPUs does not offer a real interest in a desktop computer for the time being; and if you plan to use GPGPU in the future you better wait for more powerful GPU-based hardware.
- Intel did not released Penryn CPUs with much higher clock speed.
In summary, if Apple would release new iMacs based on the architecture being used in new MacBook Pro models, it would not be faster performance wise, and might even be more expensive as current DDR3 modules while having larger bandwidth have poorer latency.

It is now official, final specifications of USB 3.0 will be unveiled on November 17th and should validate the maximum transfer speed from 480 Mbits/s (USB 2.0) to 5 Gbits/s. From that date, chip designers, motherboard and peripheral manufacturers will start preparing their "USB 3.0 ready" products which should arrive on our shelves for Q1 2009. However, one will have to wait that computer manufacturers and chipset designers (Intel, AMD, NVidia, etc…) will release their first USB 3.0 controllers to see the market for USB 3.0 product really taking off.
While the Firewire forum did not validate the future Firewire 1600 and 3200 formats, the lack of Firewire 400 on the new MacBook might indicate that Apple decided to drop Firewire support on the long-term. Let’s hope that USB 3.0 can finally deliver higher performance levels than those available for years with the Firewire 800.

TSMC, one of the 2 main on-demand founder, will offer 32nm processing as early as 2009. This announcement no so surprising if one consider that Intel will release 32 nm-engraved CPU in 2009, demonstrate that Santa-Clara’s founder does not have a huge technology advance over other founders anymore.
This is good news for consumers as we will benefit from thinner engraving process in for our GPU, especially for better performance at low clock frequency, aiming to reduce heat release, a problem not tackle by ATI or NVidia yet.

ARS Technica reports that to fight piracy in China, one of the Hollywood majors will offer online movie renting starting at 60 cents! This is the new step in the battle launched by Hollywood Majors to fight movie piracy in this country. It comes after the launch of movie DVDs for 3 USD. The new offer by Warner is VOD renting system, starting at 0.6 till 1.03 USD per download.
In other words, while we are paying premium prices to allow Hollywood majors to report profits, the same companies are applying completely different price policies in emerging countries as China. Instead of directly dealing with the local government to make their copyright better protected they launch aggressive offer which would be successful in developed countries. In other words, to get the best deal as a customer, you better live in non-democratic countries, otherwise you will have to pay premium price…

When Yahoo was looking for a white knight in its fight against Microsoft, Google was offering help, mostly to avoid that Redmond acquired tools developed by Yahoo. After weeks of uncertainties, and considering the legal problems with which Google will have to deal with if bringing its support to Yahoo, Google decided to drop its initial project. So both companies will remain competitors in the online ads market. This is probably not good news for Yahoo considering that the current economic situation will likely to see ads budgets to be decreased.

Definitely, the Apple lawyers are not going to be unemployed. They now will have to manage a class action concerning a well-known problem and that has been around for some length of time. It affects the G4 Powerbook 1,5 and 1,67 models where one of the two memory slots stopped working.
Apple launched a recall, but it only covered a fraction of the affected machines, leaving a significant number people out in the cold. One had hoped for an extension of this recall, but nothing happened.
This thus will have to be regulated in front of the court, a defeat of Apple will cost them dear, since they will be at least forced to repair the machines in question. We let to you imagine the logistic difficulties to have to exchange the mother cards before repairing them for new exchanges. It would be indeed be illusory to consider manufacturing them new, the parts like the processors and video cards belong to a previous era.
With the Airport Express base stations, the watercooling leaks and the lines on the iMac, this problem of slots belongs to the pile that has to be sorted out some time. However to regulate these problem, it will not make a big hole in their bank account which has more than 25 billion dollars.