News for Friday, 28 November 2008

Our friend Alex at themacgamer.com posted a nice and interesting article about the state of the Mac gaming, from a user point of view, but also from his recent discussion with Apple representatives.
Starting with a citation from John Carmack "The truth is Steve Jobs doesn’t care about games", Alex brings facts back to light, clearly stating that despite the successful come-back of Mac hardware thanks to the synergy between design and powerful OS, the Mac almost remains a no-go for gamers.
It seems that Apple did not understand the lesson from more a decade when users switched from Apple/Mac to PC/windows because there were simply more games for PC than for Mac. Fifteen years later it seems that it did not evolve, and despite Transgaming initiative and effort with Cider to ease porting PC game the Mac, Mac gamers are still missing one point: Apple's commitment for game. Cupertino should think a bit ahead and understand that having an iMac at home is fun with iLife, but if you want that children keep using Mac later on, you better allow them to play with their games as well as having creative fun with audio and video on the same computer: a Mac. Maybe the future iMac to be announced in January and powered with a true desktop Quad Core CPU will open wider the door to the game industry for Mac users, it would also require Apple and ATI + NVidia to work together to offer us decent drivers for our limited choice of graphic cards.
A must read: The State of Mac Gaming

Pioneer unveiled a new Blu-ray burner dedicated to desktop computers.

Available only in SATA format, this drive can burn single and double layer BD-R media at 8x, and at 2x for rewritable BD media. It can of course burn CD s and DVDs.
In order to be different from other BD burner, Pioneer decided to promote the ease of use of this drive by end users, making it possible to jump unreadable tracks or sections as standalone BD players do. This drive is also taking advantage of enhanced algorithm to play dirty or scratched media, while being able to modulate the power and angle of the laser beam to obtain the best result possible.
This promising drive should be available beginning of next year and its price should be around 400 USD.

An American private school, Saint Edward's university, which is established in Angers (France) becomes the first approved university training centre for Apple. All the computing products will be stamped with an apple, and the registered students will have an Apple certification at the end of the course.
Let us wish that this show case encourages more schools and universities to move away from Microsoft, Dell or HP to propose courses specialized in the Mac world, which unfortunately is still too rare.
However it should be said that Apple has not yet decided to remake a real effort for this to happen.

Promised for November, Apple 24" LED Display will not be late, all at least for the first few to have ordered them. The first have left the factories and should possibly arrive as early as tomorrow, but more probably at the beginning of next week, with only 1 or two days of delay on the deadline for Apple.
Soon one finally will know what these screens have inside and if the LED retro lighting really brings an advantage to this product by helping to mask the reflections.

Here the reductions that Apple proposes; today:
- 41€ on the basic iMac, and 81.01€ on the other models
- 101€ on MacBook Unibody and 51€ on the white entry level.
- 11€ on a nano iPod and 21€ on the other iPods.
- 21€ on an Apple TV or Time Capsules.
Apple also proposes a saving of a few euros on a large selection of accessories.
One is very far from the 15% predicted by analysts. Apple is still not the kind to put its products 'on sale'.
Black Friday on Apple Store