News for Wednesday, 18 February 2009

The information was already floating around for weeks as a rumor, but it is now official. Fujitsu will transfer to Toshiba its HDD design, development, manufacturing, sales, and all other functions currently carried out by Fujitsu and Fujitsu Group companies, with the exception of Fujitsu's HDD head and media businesses. It will include:
- Fujitsu's HDD development, manufacturing, and sales divisions
- HDD manufacturing subsidiaries Fujitsu Computer Products Corporation of the Philippines (FCPP) and Fujitsu (Thailand) Co., Ltd. (FTC)
- HDD design, development, quality assurance and other departments of Yamagata Fujitsu Limited
- HDD technology development department of Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.
- HDD sales and marketing offices outside Japan
One can question the real benefit of such deal for Toshiba as the plate-based HD might disappear when SSD will have fully invaded the customer electronic market. For sure, Toshiba will now control a larger portion of the 2.5" HD market and might in parallel develop SSD models targeting high-end notebook models.

The website PC Per put its hands on a prototype of the forthcoming high-end SSD from OCZ, the Summit.

As expected from its controller and the components used, performance levels are very high, and this 250 GB SSD can compete or deliver higher figures than the Intel X-25M used as the best in class reference so far. The 64 MB of cache associated to the controller are likely to be the main key factor of such performance levels.
Prices will target this SSD to high-end category: 249 USD for 60GB, 499 USD for 120 GB and 999 USD for 250 GB.

AppleGazette released photos of the unpacking of the new MacBook Pro 17":

For those who already placed their order, they should receive their notebook in the coming hours or days, at least for the glossy display order. However, the current shipping time for the MBP 17” is around 3 to 4 weeks, even when purchasing a default model without any BTO!!
As usual, ifixit published a step-by-step procedure to disassemble the new MacBook Pro 17”.

http://www.ifixit.com/...
There is not many differences with the Macbook Pro 15” concerning the motherboard, fans or optical drive/HD, however the battery is significantly larger. Its capacity might make many notebook users dreaming of it: 12820 mAh, so almost three times more than the 4600 mAh unit found in the MBP 15” the battery life time expected to be around 8 hours might really be in line with real life usage. It would be nice if Apple could transfer such battery technology to the other notebook models, it could provide a dramatic increase of battery life time without requiring any change regarding the volume taken by the unit itself.

Apple released an SMC firmware update for the recently revised white MacBook. It fixes a problem slow booting procedure when the MacBook is not directly cable powered. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3435
http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacBook_SMC_Update_1_3