News for Friday, 21 November 2008

Goulwen, one of our team members, received a bad news yesterday when checking for the shipping status of his Apple DisplayPort-Dual Link DVI adapter. As indicated in the email below sent by Apple France, he will have to wait till mid-December, in best case:

This adaptor is required if you want to use the Apple 30” Cinema Display with the new MacBook models. So, you might have to wait till Christmas to hope getting such adapter in shops, or at least from the Apple Store… Maybe Apple is acting on purpose to push owners of the new MacBook models to purchase the new 24" LED Cinema Display...
If you consider that this is the only display which can work natively with the MacBook models, while all other displays (including previous Apple Cinema display) will require adaptors. We are still waiting for the missing adaptor: Mini DisplayPort -> DisplayPort (or HDMI) which will allow the new MacBook models to be plugged to HDMI peripherals...but none of them is branded by Apple, so why would you expect such adaptor to be developed by Cupertino...

iTunes update 8.0.2 is available via the software update and comes in at 60,3 MB.
Here is a list of changes

iTunes 8.0.2 improves stability and performance and provides a number of important bug fixes, including:
• Addresses a quality issue creating MP3s on some computers.
• Fixes a connectivity issue with the iTunes Store when using some Internet proxies with Mac OS X.
• Improves accessibility with VoiceOver.

Given the slowness that we have seen this year for the first SSD disks worthy of this name to arrive, we thought that it would still take a very a long time for this market to mature.
But it seems that this market has become wrapped up. Samsung who already have a 128 GB SSD disk that is used in the new portable range of Apple have announced that they have started the production of new models with double this capacity. But the best remains to come. The data flow announced for these products (containing memory MCL) are 220 MB/s for reading and 200 MB/s for writing. Samsung thus will join Intel which has only the excellent 80 GB disk with such mind boggling performances, and who have announced a still better160 GB.
The price of these products will remain certainly very high (probably above 600€), however their acceptable capacity and their performances that far surpass the traditional hard drives should open a top-of-the-range market to them. Manufacturers of less powerful disks will then have no other choice than to exploit the prices.

It might be considered as useless, but it brings interesting information about the integration of components in the new MacBook when looking at it under X-Ray (Brought to us by http://www.theaftermac.com):

One can see how the battery is installed and the location of the HD. It illustrates also how technology can be packed; we might find some space for a Firewire controller…

Now available at your favorite iTunes, Apple gives you iPhone OS 2.2
It brings a number of enhancements and bug fixes, including

*Enhancements to Maps
-Google Street View
-public transit and walking directions
-display address of dropped pins
-share location via email
*Enhancements to Mail
-resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching of email
-improved formatting of wide HTML email
-improved stability and performance of Safari
*Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
*Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
*Improved sound quality of visual voicemail messages
*Pressing the Home button from any Home screen takes you to the first Home screen
*Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard Settings

It weighs in at 246MB and be carefull if you have a jailbroken/sim-unlocked iPhone as this update might turn your iPhone to stone and kill puppies.
Oh yes, and the update also brings some security fixes, including the infamous possibility to call ANY phone number when the phone is locked by using the "Emergency call" button:

Passcode Lock
CVE-ID: CVE-2008-4228
Available for: iPhone OS 1.0 through 2.1, iPhone OS for iPod touch 1.1 through 2.1
Impact: Emergency calls are not restricted to emergency numbers
Description: iPhone provides the ability to make an emergency call when locked. Currently, an emergency call may be placed to any number. A person with physical access to an iPhone may take advantage of this feature to place arbitrary calls which are charged to the iPhone owner. This update addresses the issue by restricting emergency calls to a limited set of phone numbers.

About time...

Acording to Lite-On, 2009 will be the year when the market of Combo Blu-ray (reading Blu-ray/engraving DVD and CD) will really start. The price of these devices will remain rather high ($100 to $200) so not before 2011 will they become in general public use, when their price should be halved. This is this same year that the Blu-ray burners themselves will reach an attractive price to become available to the general public.
Contrary to what some hoped, the death of the HD-DVD has not given a large whiplash to this market. The problem is, of course, that the price is far too high for the devices able to read and to write Blu-ray media as well as the cost of the virgin media and films in this format.
By 2011, Blu-ray has the chance of competition from the USB keys which will have a higher storage capacity at an attractive price point.

Tech Radar has had the chance d' to have a prototype in hand of a Xeon mother board equipped with two Nehalem processors running at 2,8 GHz. The machine was equipped in addition with 24 GB of 1066 MHz RAM DDR3.
They could not make and publish large tests, however they launched SPEC CPU2006, a test often used by the foundries to give the raw power of their processor.
The machine obtained a score of 160. This figure does not mean much by itself, however we know that a configuration similar to our Mac Pro and equipped with two 3,4 GHz Xeon obtained 90 points with this test.
Thus the difference is enormous, and one could deduce from this simple test that the next Mac Pro has a high risk of blowing away the current model.
Note that this result is due mainly to the memory bandwidth (with the controller integrated into the CPU) which reached 35 GB/s.