According to
Ifoapplestore, Apple is preparing major modifications of its organization of the Apple Store. In effect, the Mac will be relegated to the second place leaving the field free for software and the demonstrations which are currently not very visible. The goal is thus to push less the design, and more on what one can do with a Mac. This is not such a bad idea except that there are numerous cliches on this subject.
In spite of the poor relative success of Blu-ray, the industrialists are now putting all their energy to restart the sales of audio-visual equipment.
The new eldorado, or rather the supposed new technology is the 3D.
Panasonic believes in it strongly, and announced that its 3D equipment will be ready in 2010. It will need new television sets able to manage at least a frequency of 120Hz in order to double the update rate as well as Blu-ray readers compatible with 3D FHD.
It is interesting to note that according to Panasonic only the plasma screens are good enough to display this 3D with good quality. Other technologies would have (always according to their words) difficulty with displaying twice the 1080p images.
This is what is needed to restart the Plasma TVs that have lost out compared to the LCD, all at least if the manufacturers of LCD screens are really not able to adapt their products to these new constraints.
Since we speak about television sets, Mitsubishi have announced that they have
suspended production of the LaserVue television sets following a problem encountered with the production equipment of production. We do not know the gravity of the problem, but the company hopes to start again its production as fast as possible but certainly not immediately, if not they would have solved the problem already.
After years of negotiations, NVidia and Intel found an agreement giving the right to Santa Clara’s giant to offer SLI-compatible motherboards. So, Apple could integrate such technology in the future revision of Mac Pro (not sure it it will be for the one planned for end of March)
As a reminder, NVidia SLI allows the simultaneous use of multiple NVidia graphic cards, to strengthen or boost 3D rendering or computing. If Apple will most likely not implement such technology for games, it would definitely consider it for enhancing performance of Open CL in Snow Leopard.
According to
Fudzilla, Intel will release in June three new models of mobile Core 2 Duo CPU:
- Core 2 Duo T9900, clocked at 3.06 GHz with 6 MB of cache: 530 USD
- Core 2 Duo P9700, clocked at 2.8 GHz with 6 MB of cache: 348 USD.
- Core 2 Duo P8800, clocked at 2.66 GHz with 3 MB of cache: 241USD.
In June, or during the WWDC, Apple should refresh the current MBP models to extend the life cycle of the current series before the transition to the mobile platform based on Nehalem which should not arrive before Q4 2009.
During a conference NVIDIA announced that the first products based on its Ion platform will be available in Spring.
The bottom price for these configurations will be $299 for a bare desktop machine, without a screen.
According to a rumour, Apple is interested by this platform. We continue to think that it would fit in the next evolution of the Apple TV that may, at least support 1080p but especially to be compatible with the SATA hard drives, as PATA currently being used is limited in capacity and since it is not popular it is thus more expensive.
While waiting, NVidia made a promotion based on Windows, showing the power of Ion able to run Windows 7 and have also acquired the certification Windows Vista.
