News for Friday, 16 January 2009

According to Toms Hardware, Apple will have received before the official announcement and especially before the other manufacturers, information about the prototypes of the platform ION from Nvidia.


Recalling the facts, it is based on a GPU 9400M intended for the ATOM processors.
Even though the performance of this platform are far from being ridiculous once the ATOM 33O is fitted with in two cores as these first tests show, however we do not think that it will be used to equip a Mac mini. Even if they could decrease the size, clearly the new models would see the raw performances of the CPU part dropping in a very significant way. One would certainly have in exchange an important gain with the video part, but it would not be sufficient to convince. On the other hand, we continue to think that ION would be quite simply perfect to equip a new generation of the Apple TV:
- The installed capacity of the CPU is additional and would be higher than that of the current models, using the ancestors of the ATOM.
- The 9400M is able to decode 1080p without effort and also to decode the sound.
- Its SATA connectors would make it possible at Apple to propose models with significantly higher capacities, 500 GB currently.
- Size, or rather the area of the Apple TV could be divided by 2 or 3 thus making it really tiny.
Everyone pleads in favour of this product. But it is possible that Apple will release a Mac nano to replace or in addition to the Mac mini which would come to play the role between the keyboard and the screen. Such a product, if its price were acceptable would make certainly make a massacre of the competition.

Yesterday, we were reporting about a problem affecting Seagate HD from the 7200.11 series for models featuring 500 to 1.5 GB of storage space. The news quickly spread out and the German website Computerbase.de offers a synthesis of the currents facts and symptoms. The problem affects mostly HD manufactured in Seagate Thailand plants and shipping with the firmware S15.
The failure comes without any preliminary sign during the boot procedure of the computer, as the HD is then recognized as being a volume with 0GB of free space. There is currently no fix, and it is independent of the OS and/or configuration.
Companies specialized in HD data rescue indicated that data are still stored on the HD, but the firmware is blocking access to them.
According to some websites, the failure rate for those drives might reach 30 to 40%; this is simple 10 fold higher than the average rate usually recorded.
Seagate did not officially communicate about the problem but indicated to some people that they are working on a fix and should release an official statement during the week-end. While waiting for a solution, we recommend any users to backup all data stored on such HD from this series.
We will keep you inform about future development.

NVidia has posted a particularly alarming warning on its results and now predicts a fall of its incomes in the order of 40 to 50%.
The company puts this historical and dramatic fall on the back of the consumers who clearly decreased their purchases of graphics cards but also on the computer manufacturers who rather than place new orders preferred to liquidate their stocks.
It is more than probable that the ratio of price/performances of its Geforce GTX, and the bad one press related to the defective chips 8600 are also a cause.
And the situation risks not to be fixed in the short run, if one looks at the latest advertisements made for their mobile chips. Rather than launching something new, they were satisfied to rename the current ranges and being satisfied with rather parsimonious improvements.
The only hope that remains is that the economic crisis does not last too long a time and that the CUDA quickly becomes a standard (helped by Open CL?): a unquestionable way to start again the sales of powerful chips.

If we were thinking that Apple Legal was in a less active phase since the Think Secret story, we were fully wrong. Wired was forced to remove a video from its website after a "cease-and-desist" request from Apple Legal. This video was simply showing a Netbook transformed in a Hackintosh and running OS X.
In August 2005 we were posting the first video showing a functional Hackintosh running a beta version of Mac OS X x86 project, and we were forced to remove them from the site. Other websites, willing to challenge Apple Legal (or generate some easy traffic) Gizmodo and ZDNet posted the same video later, simply showing that a PC can run OS X after simple modification.
Apple Legal seems to remain strict about the Hackintosh syndrome, and doing its best to get bad relationships between Apple and Mac- and IT-information dedicated websites.

According to a report from AppleInsider, Apple might be trying to file a trademark for "OS X". If there is currently no explanation, one can list potential ones:
- Apple wants to remove the word "Mac" from the name of its OS.
- Apple wants to better and further develop image of its OS and associate it with all its products on iPhones, Apple TV and all products to come.
- Apple might decide to sell its OS, not only for Mac, but also for PC, reviving the "clone era".

This is quite surprising if one considers that following the Intel switch, Apple renamed all hardware models with the "Mac", dropping PowerBook and iBook for respectively MacBook Pro and MacBook.