News for Thursday, 15 January 2009

In order to demonstrate its know-how, and maybe try to make some of the recent failures of its products history, OCZ demonstrated a prototype of a SSD drive from the Vertex 2 series. Performance gain just amazed the audience with respectively 550 MB/s and 480 MB/S in reading and writing modes!
One will have to wait for the official availability of this product to perform a true test, as well as the required SATA III controller, as the current SATA II is not able to get such transfer speed on a single channel. This result demonstrates the huge potential and the rapid evolution of SSD when compared to plate-based HDs.

So far certified repair and maintenance centers were trained by Apple and receiving instructions and manuals in English. Those "service manuals or source manual describe how to identify, operate and perform repair procedures. Such documents are restricted to internal usage.

Apple recently changed its policy and just released service manuals localized in different languages, the first two samples are dedicated to the unibody MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro.
This is a good idea and will for sure make repair center's life easier for training their technicians and further increase their support centers, especially required with the increase of the Mac market and users.
PS: as those documents are reserved to internal usage, do not request them from us, we will not distribute them.

When Snow Leopard was announced, it was meant to refresh the all system layers when touching the interface. So far, all beta versions followed this schema, and if the engine is completely different, one can not spot the difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard.
However, it seems that Apple decided to introduce so changes in the GUI. IT does not seem to be radical modifications, but rather a new theme that will be unified to the system and all application running on it. So far we only know its name: "Marble".
This change is most likely restricted to the cosmetic point of view, and was a bit expected as Apple needs to justify visually some of the deep changes made internally in the system, the marketing team needs some material for the future campaign and does not want to only rely on the substantial performance gain brought by Snow Leopard.

In a letter sent to all associates, Steve Jobs explained the reason of his decision to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June. Tim Cook will replace him for the daily operations while Steve will remain involved in major decisions.
No more words from our side, as we decided not to fuel this type of buzz.

Team,
I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.
In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.
I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.
I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.
Steve

OCZ officially revealed a new range of SSD disks named Apex.

Thanks to a internal RAID 0, these disks will be capable of very large data flows, 230 MB/s for reading and 160 MB/s for writing. These discs will be proposed into 60,120 and 250 GB versions; their prices have not been shown yet. Note that the two other ranges, Vertex and Solid remain in the catalogue, Apex comes into play for the midranges. Of course, it will be necessary to await the first tests to have an idea of their performances. Indeed, their line entry suffers from an underpowered controller that gets quickly bogged down in the event of multiple requests. If this disk has the same problem that affects of the two entry line products, this defect will be accentuated.
[UPDATE] These disks are already in the catalogue of certain retailers. count on less than 250€ for the 60 GB, less than 450€ for the 120 GB and less than 850€ for the 250 GB.

According to Tom's Hardware FR, Seagate is infected by an epidemic of breakdowns concerning its 7200.11 series of disks.
The breakdown are characterized by a sudden disappearance of the system disk, as if their electronics had burned. It is, in fact, a bug of their firmware which would lead the disk to be put into a mode of protection from which it cannot leave.
If the solution appears simple (i.e. an update the firmware) it cannot be applied once the disk has entered this mode, and Seagate still does not propose an update.
This brings back to mind the breakdowns with the series of 2.5" disks marked with famous firmware 7.0.1 which almost always ended up giving up the ghost after one year of use. There too, Seagate never communicated officially on this defect, preferring to play it deaf, a ploy in which Apple followed them.

Toshiba, the specialist in the 1.8" hard drive (with which the iPod Classic are still equipped), announced that they have repurchased the hard drive activity of its Fujitsu competitor who are rather specialized in the 2.5" segment of the market intended for the OEM market.
This repurchase makes Toshiba the largest manufacturer in the world of of small size hard drives. It will certainly allow the company to lower its of R&D and production costs in order to fight for a longer time against the SSD disks which aim at the same targets.

While waiting for a hypothetical a nano iPhone in June, the rumour that Apple will launch a iPhone 3G equipped with only 4 GB of memory comes again to the surface.
The economic crisis having passed by; thus to decrease the quantity of memory (the most expensive component of the iPhone) would make it possible to propose an entry line model sold at a low price by the operators, and this would widen the market of Apple; Apple would then recover the shortfall later on at the AppStore.

All possible routes are certainly studied by Apple to lower to the maximum the selling price of the iPhone without cutting down too much on its margins.