News for Tuesday, 20 January 2009

Not knowing how to survive the never-ending fall of the price of memory chips, the majority of the manufacturer decided to stop their expensive production lines.
Since last September, the production has thus dropped by 22%. It seems that this bet proved to be the good for the manufacturers who have found a balance. The price of the NAND MLC flash memory intended for USB keys, mp3 playerss or SSD disks have risen by 3% in one week. Certain long term contracts foresee the value of the chips increasing by 7 to 30%.
The market of the random access memory also seems to follow the same way with a quivering rise of 1 to 3%.
But as we said there is little these industries can do: since it is difficult to keep these production lines halted for a long time since they certainly are not fully paid off. As soon as the first one cracks, the others will follow and this will cause a fall of the prices again.

Our friend Alex from The Mac gamer had the chance to discuss with Chris Bentley, Mac 3D Manager, from AMD. It is always interesting to read thoughts about hardware companies when it comes to the game industry on Mac, and how they have to deal with evolution, porting games with TransGaming cider, developing OpenGL drivers, etc. Last but not least, Chris Bentley made some comments regarding forthcoming OpenCL and how AMD is working to make it supported by AMD/ATI GPU in our Mac.
To read the entire interview: Interview with Chris Bentley from AMD

At the end of last year, editors of http://www.mojejabluszko.pl, a well-known Mac-dedicated website in Poland, contacted us for a partnership. We agreed that they will translate some of Macbidouille/Hardmac news in Polish on their website to further share information to the Mac community. We hope that our polish readers will enjoy it, as they will now be able to get some of Hardmac news in their own language while having the original english-based information available via a link.

According to Neowin, Microsoft will launch service aiming to compete with several services released by Apple:
- SkyBox will be the MobileMe-like application, allowing Windows Mobile users to synchronize data between their mobile phone and a server.
- SkyLine will be the Pro-oriented version of SkyBox, supporting Exchange servers.
- SkyMarket will be the AppStore-like application for Windows Mobile.
As stated couple of years ago by Apple for the release of Leopard: "Redmond, you can start the copier". Microsoft is demonstrating that to avoid major failure of products, the best way might be to copy successful idea, of course you are not really innovating, but at least you do not fail... well not always true as shown by the Zune...

Internet became the largest market for many companies, and gives the opportunity to make your products known by most potential users. While offering many advantages, it is also a double sided- knife, as unhappy customers can openly criticize your product or post negative evaluation about one of your product.
If manufacturers or distributors contribute to such evaluation and/or ranking, most of them do not do it openly, and use virtual users or customers to positively review their own products positively. This was not a secret, making most of such ranking biased and useless for new or potential customers. However, Belkin got caught openly recruiting "virtual" customers to promote its products on its website:

Of course with internet such mistake quickly went through all news network and Belkin CEO reacted by publishing an opened letter in which he apologizes for the mistake of one employee and an action taken by one person only not representing the policy of the company...
It is a bit hard to believe that one person will take such responsibility without a green light from the high management, especially considering that the procedure was well defined and explained. But one should not forget that if Belkin got caught, all other manufacturers are using those procedures too, they are maybe smarter, but most likely not innocents... even some distributors or resellers are suspected to shill in their internal ranking to promote products on which they have the biggest margins...

Seagate posted yesterday the first firmware update for some of its HD affected by the "sudden death syndrome". It concerned only Drives from the following series: ST3500320AS, ST3640330AS, ST3750330AS, ST31000340AS hosting one of the following firmware: SD15, SD16, SD17, SD18, SD19 or AD14. The new firmware is entitled SD1A. You can download the disk image (.iso) from the following address: http://support.seagate.com/firmware/MooseDT-32MB-SD1A.ISO
A second firmware dedicated HD belonging to the following series ST31500341AS, ST31000333AS, ST3640323AS, ST3640623AS, ST3320613AS, ST3320813AS, ST3160813AS is being evaluated and should be release soon.
To apply this firmware update, you need to burn the iso image on a CD with the integrated disk utility, then insert the CD and reboot while pressing "C" key. You will need to launch the file DriveDetect.exe and to follow the instruction (only works on a MacIntel). The firmware patcher does only work properly if one drive is directly connected via a SATA port. No other HD must be connected internally or externally. Last but not least, do not apply a firmware which is not associated with your HD model. According to The Register, Seagate offers customers with "bricked" HD to get their data recovered for free.
Unfortunately, Seagate servers went down due to the high number of requests, making most customers upset. Some customers with the precious firmware patcher tried to use it on their HD model, but it often did not work. Considering that it was a free day and impossible to reach Seagate support team, it did not contribute to make unfortunate Seagate customers happy. Once more this problem will have contributed to demonstrate to users that it is necessary to backup data as one can not rely only on a single storage volume.

As foreseen, Intel lowered the price of some of its Core 2 Quad processors in order to make a place for the new models that have a TDP of 65W, which according to rumours will be used in the next generation of the iMac that we have beens waiting for some weeks. There are 3 processors:
- C2Q Q8200s: 2,33GHz 2x2 MB of cache FSB 1333 MHz for $239
- C2Q Q9400s: 2,66GHz 2x4 MB of cache FSB 1333 MHz for $318
- C2Q Q9550s: 2,83GHz 2x6 MB of cache FSB 1333 MHz for $367

The prices shown are those for 1000 quantity. Apple will certainly pay a much lower price. Since they are processors for office machines, they are sold with a lower price than Core 2 Duo for mobiles currently used by Apple in the iMac; thus we can hope for price reduction of the iMac, except if the rest of the components are more expensive at Apple.

According to 9to5mac it is possible to have 4 finger gestures on a Penryn Macbook Pro with the beta of Snow Leopard and without any do-it-yourself fudging.
If the thing is confirmed with the final version (we live in hope) it will be a small present made to those who thought Apple incapable of doing this to customers who have already bought a product.
This is perhaps also the way found Apple to activate this function without having to do it via a specific paying update as it was the case for the activation of the 802.11n because of the Sarbanes-Oxley law.