World of Apple

The current line of iMacs uses ATI’s Radeon X1600 Graphics Card, and although this is a welcome boost it appears more power may be due in the very near future.

A report straight from ATI’s Conference room suggests that the Radeon X1800 card will be present either optional or not in future iMacs.

An individual very close to the core of Apple has spoken out on the Cult of Mac Blog, offering information about how the Keynote address was changed at the last minute, slating the 12″ and 17″ MacBook Pro’s from the lineup.

The decision is supposedly due to supply issues and the products are described as “very, very cool stuff”

Reports have emerged that the .Mac service will be undergoing maintenance during the MWSF Keynote on Tuesday.

Mac will be undergoing scheduled maintenance from 7:00 AM to 12:00 PM PST on 1/10/06. All .Mac services will be affected. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Previous rumours have suggested that .Mac will be the centre of some great new products at MWSF.

PowerPage has made a reports stating that it believes Apple could release a 42″ and 50″ Plasma displays at MWSF.

The report states that the displays would be powered by Viiv, the prices are said to be $2599 and $3299 respectively.

The report is very unusual and Powerpage aren’t usually spot on with their details.

Rumour has it that Apple may have something really juicy up their sleeves. DigiTimes has reported that it believes Apple will release an Intel laptop with flash based cache for super fast startups and performance. The laptop is expected to be based on Intels Robson technology which makes use of flash memory to increase performance.

Not much more information was available on this particular rumour.

Readers around the Mac web noticed this afternoon that Apple had accidentally posted a link to its new iLife ‘06 product, expected to be released next Tuesday at MWSF.

The page listed the usual suspects, i.e Garageband, iPhoto, iTunes but also mentioned an extra, iWeb.

Some readers also noted that the Garageband page mentioned the importing of video, possibly for video Podcasts.

In usual Apple slip up fashion all signs of the pages and links disappeared, but not without some people grabbing screenshots.

ThinkSecret has posted a report claiming that Apple will be showing off some radical news products at NAB this year, the show is taking place between the 22nd and 27th of April in Las Vegas.

According to the report new products will include Final Cut Pro 6, Final Cut Extreme and Xserve RAID Extreme. Final Cut Pro 6 is said to include new features such as 5.1 Surround sound editing, 1080/24p and 1030/30p DVCPROHD support whereas no details are supplied on for Final Cut Pro Extreme but is described as “an extremely high end version of its video software”, likely to be priced around the $10,000 mark.

Also noted is the Xserve RAID which is said to be dubbed Extreme which will feature an Infiniband Link rather than the current Fibre Channel, as well as supporting more capacity.

Finally the article also hints at the possibility of a larger Cinema Display supporting a reoslution of 4520×2540 and an upcoming digital video camera.

The New York Time has reported that a new service has appeared on the internet that allows unlimited downloads of movies for just $9.95 a month.

The service is available at Vongo.com and currently offers 800 movies for download at $9.95 a month. Users are allowed unlimited downloads. Movies are in Windows Media Player format, widescreen aspect ratio and approximately 600MB in size. (Example Specs: The Incredibles comes in a 700Kbps bitrate, Windows Media 9, 64Kbps stereo WMA9 audio, and 680×368 resolution.)

The newspaper goes on to talk about Apple and it expects a future offering from Apple that will let people watch video over the Internet from their Macs or TV sets. It also mentions how Steve Jobs has spoken out against the renting of any form of download.

AppleInsider has posted a story claiming that “reliable sources” have stated that Apple is outsourcing the development of the motherboard for its next-gen PowerMac to Intel.

According to the article Apple has planned the development of Intel PowerBooks, iMacs, iBooks and Mac minis and the outsourcing of the PowerMac motherboard will help them stay on track for a 3Q 2006 ship date for the Intel PowerMac.

A new Firm by the name of What I Want Podcasting has promised to offer Podcasts for sale through the iTunes Music Store “in the very near future”. In particular the company will offer footage from Air Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival which takes place in early 2006.

“We have developed exclusive video invitations from artists appearing at the festival and created a promotional podcast concert series. We then distributed it throughout the Web, on iTunes, podcast directories, Google Video, and many more websites.” says Martin Elmore, president of What I Want Podcasting.