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A very interesting article has appeared containing an interview with Michel Mayer CEO of Freescale. The article finally offers proof that IBM decided to simply ditch the G5 and pushed Jobs over the edge thus making the switch to Intel.
Contrary to reports by World of Apple, Think Secret and AppleInsider a Taiwanese source has claimed that no Intel machines will appear before June 2006 and has in fact hedged bets on an exact release date of June 6th.
As previously predicted by World of Apple, it has been confirmed that the Meadowhall Apple Store in Sheffield, UK will be opening on 10th December.
Early Tuesday morning Apple updated its iTunes Music Store service to include more television shows from NBC, Sci Fi and USA, as before all content is available in the US only and for $1.99.
Some of the programming from NBC consists of episodes and clips from Law and Order, The Office, Surface, Knight Rider, Dragnet, Adam-12, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Meanwhile Sci Fi channel is offering Battlestar Galactica and USA Network offering Monk.
“We’re thrilled to expand the iTunes video catalog with 11 popular TV shows from NBC, USA Network and the Sci-Fi Channel,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “In our first two months we’ve sold more than three million videos, and have expanded our TV catalog from five shows to 16 shows.”
Think Secret has posted an article claiming that Apple has “tapped” Synaptics to supply click wheels for the iPod nano.
Earlier in the year World of Apple reported on Apple creating their own proprietary click wheel for the nano, but is evidently having supply issues.
Reports have emerged that Apple began shipping some of its high-end Quad G5 systems containing the nVidia GeForce 7800 GT graphics card.
It had previously been stated by Apple that systems ordered with the high-end graphics card may not ship until late into December but some of these customers received shipping notifications mid last week.
Once a backlog of orders has been cleared Apple will begin selling the “PowerMac G5 Quad Ulitimate” which will sell for around $4000 and included the 7800, 1GB RAM and a 500GB Hard Drive.
On Apple’s website the card is stated to have the following specs:
Last week Think Secret came out with a story that claims that the Mac mini will be unveiled with a brand new Intel processor and featuring a more digital hub orientated set of features.
Expected to be released one year after its initial release the future Mac mini will feature the upcoming Front Row 2 with access to Apple’s new content distribution system.
World of Apple has researched this rumour as we find it of great interest, we have discovered much like Think Secret that the form factor is likely to change due to a shift to 3.5″ hard drives.
The Mac mini will be moving to the new Intel processors but there will be several tiers of pricing available with optional add on modules such as the ability to add DVR abilities.
The new Mac mini will feature the new Yonah processor, two different speeds will be available, 1.66Ghz and 1.50GHz single core low voltage and the possibility of a higher tier Yonah at 1.66Ghz but featuring dual cores.
Think Secret has posted a very interesting story stating that it expects Apple to release a new media content distribution system. The system will aid in the delivery of feature length content, and television offerings.
The down side of the system appears to be its relation to .Mac’s iDisk, it is unknown whether content would be stored there or just some kind of key to unlock the content, if either of these are the case then you have to wonder how the iPod fits into this equation.
In addition Think Secret reports that Front Row 2 will be a key figure in this system.
In other news Fox has gone on the record to say that it is “open to” a deal with iTunes.
As promised last week we will be covering the topic of emulation as we move closer to the big switch, last week we covered how Apple could play the naming game, this week we will be looking into Rosetta, Apple’s name for the PowerPC emulator.
Rosetta will ship with every Intel version of Mac OS X, quite simply it translates PowerPC binaries into Intel binaries on the fly providing a layer of emulation for PowerPC applications to run on the new Intel machines.
Now lets delve deep into how exactly Rosetta will work and what it will do. Rosetta is based on Transitive Corp’s QuickTransit technology and can translate the following instruction sets:
As you’ve probably worked out the G5 instruction set is missing from this list and that simply because Rosetta is not designed to emulate G5 code, this quite simply means that development of such applications will require re-compiling to Universal Binaries (more on this later).
Rosetta does not run the following:
It is currently hard to know how well Rosetta will translate code on the fly as systems are rare and those using them wouldn’t risk losing them by releasing benchmarks but surprise, surprise some people have and the figure sits somewhere between 60-80% native software speed, which lets me honest isn’t bad. This figure was released before Apple officially announced OpenGL and AltiVec support so it is quite possible that this figure has increased further.
For those developers who have G5 code only applications or wish to have their applications work natively on Intel systems they must recompile their applications using a thing called a Universal Binary.
A Universal Binary is an application that can run natively on both Intel and PowerPC systems, Universal Binaries are often referred too as Fat Binaries as they contain more code, as we mentioned last week a similar technology was used in the switch from 68k to PowerPC. To aid developers in creating Fat binaries Apple updated Xcode to version 2.,1 which allows the creation of Fat Binaries.
Here at World of Apple we believe Apple has gone the right way about the switch, offering two very concise methods of getting applications to run and giving developers enough time to develop for one of those methods, the question is how well will it all run?
Next Week - We move onto our countdown to MacWorld San Francisco
As of December 9th Apple customer in Florida will be able to purchase AppleCare in any retail store or third party retailers. Up to now Floridian laws have prevented the sale of AppleCare.
