Does the huge MacBook Air price drop suggest an imminent revision?

Apple is becoming better known for tooting it’s own horn, especially where price point/performance improvements are concerned. Yet, the recent drop of $500 off the price of the high-end MacBook Air ($400 less for the SSD drive and $100 for the 1.8GHz CPU) breaks with that pattern; no press releases or fanfare of any sort. Why?

Popular speculation is that a newer, faster, better Air may be just around the corner.

Lack of attention to the price drop may indicate a wish on Apple’s part to sell off the older models faster, if not in larger volume….then perhaps in order to clear space for the new MacBook Air.

Such a price drop could facilitate an early clear out of the old models to make room for the new models in time to avoid an even bigger price drop down the road. Read more

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Apple posts hidden link to iPhone 2.0 software!

If you would like to be one of the few to sneak in behind an unpublished link and download the iPhone 2.0 firmware a day early, you need merely click here! (225MB)

To use the package once it has been downloaded (using the command-line curl or ftp utils, or another downloading application which won’t auto-expand the file after download, is recommended), simply option-click on the “Check for Update” button in iTunes, and select the file.

The update will wipe all data from your phone, so it is wise to ensure that all your bookmarks et cetera are backed up. It is not generally possible to specifically backup/restore your Home Screen icons, so be prepared to start from scratch in that regard. Read more

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Rumor: New iPhones to require contract before purchase?

With the price of the new iPhone 3G significantly lower than the original price for the EDGE phone, by half in fact, many are wondering how Apple managed to cut the price so much. It is possible that Apple simply decided to lower their profit margin on the hardware itself, but typically Apple cuts prices in small amounts, like lowering the AppleTV from $299 to $229. The lowering of the iPhone 3G price to $199 for the entry model strongly suggests that Apple is allowing AT&T to subsidize the cost of the phone directly.

Previously AT&T could count on getting substantial service fees over the lifetime of the Phone, with Apple receiving a significant percentage of those fees, further increasing the profit margin on each phone sold. Read more

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Live Keynote Updates STREAMING

Click through to the full page for streaming updates from WWDC 2008! Read more

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Stay tuned for LIVE coverage of WWDC!

Mac OS Rumors will be providing live up to the minute coverage of this week’s World Wide Developer Conference — not just Steve Jobs’ keynote today, but also events as they unfold all week at the first-ever sold out WWDC! Stay tuned and check back often for all the latest!

We have powerful new servers and expect to offer very fast site performance throughout the event!

If you uncover an interesting tidbit or just have something to share as you attend the Conference, email us: rumors@macosrumors.com or submit a comment! Read more

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Mac Nano a reality with “Fusion”?


As TUAW notes, evidence has appeared suggesting Apple may be releasing a new Mac, dubbed Fusion, as an ultra light but powerful machine, possibly for developer use. If true this is quite obviously the Mac Nano everyone has been talking about for quite some time, but as with any rumor we will see what happens at WWDC tomorrow. The language of the pages is a bit unlike Apple, especially the focus on developers with a machine that will obviously replace the Mini and be desired by just about everyone, but they do stray from their straight consumer talk when targeting developers and power users, as this page appears to suggest they are doing with Fusion.

The screenshots appear to be unreleased Apple website pages, which state the following:

“Building your applications for the Mac has never been easier. Read more

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Apple is not dropping Carbon support, PowerPC code


Since the Intel switch, everyone has been waiting for Apple to set a hard deadline for support for PowerPC based Macs. Some have significant numbers of PowerPC machines in use and want to be able to continue using them with new OS X releases in the future, others are clamoring for Apple to go Intel-only.

While it is a given that Apple will eventually drop support for the last PowerPC based macs at some point with a future release of OS X, it is unlikely this will happen as soon as 10.6. Apple does set arbitrary but hard cutoff points for older hardware, but those are specific machines lacking certain features. For Apple to cut support for PowerPC hardware would mean cutting an entire architecture out of the operating system. Read more

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Logic Express 8.0.2 update follows Pro version

Despite escaping the notice of many readers who are distracted by show-stopper updates like OS X 10.5.3, Server Admin Tools 10.5.3, Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 2.1, et cetera….Apple has indeed released the 8.0.2 update to Logic Express that Express users have been waiting for since the Pro version was released earlier in the week.

The update weighs in at 73.7MB, and its release notes provide essentially no information on what the changes are — but given the size of the update, they are clearly significant.

When queried about the dearth of details on the two recent Logic updates, reliable sources in Cupertino explained that the changes are almost entirely bug fixes and were not entirely detailed for several reasons.

Chief among these, apparently, is concern among high ranking executives working under the VP of Software that several of the changes would be embarrassing to the company and that at least one might violate an NDA which Apple has signed with a third party. Read more

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Apple releases 10.5.3, Security Updates

Mac OS X 10.5.3, a massive update weighing in at well over 400MB and containing even more changes than 10.5.2 (itself sporting the largest changelist in Apple software update history) has been released along with a separate package for Tiger users containing only the relevant security updates.

Coming almost exactly when predicted by the grapevine, 10.5.3 and these Tiger Security Updates are packed to the gills with fixes and new functionality that many readers have been clamoring for since before Leopard had even shipped….

From the 10.5.3 release notes (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1141):

General

*Fixes a font issue that could result in Helvetica Narrow being used in applications instead of Helvetica.

*Addresses an issue with stuttering video and audio playback in certain USB devices. Read more

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Logic Pro 8.0.2 update posted

This update is recommended for all Logic Pro 8.0 users.

This Logic Pro 8.0.2 update addresses specific customer and compatibility issues of Logic Pro 8.0. It includes Wavebuner 1.5.2 and Impulse Response Utility 1.0.2, which address issues for Waveburner 1.5 and Impulse Response Utility 1.0 respectively.

If you are using Logic Node you will need to update your Logic Node application on connected computers as well.

After running the updater you will find an updated Logic Node installer called Logic Node 8.0.2.dmg in your Utilities folder. Read more

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Apple introduces new iMacs clocked at up to 3.06GHz(!)

Although this announcement comes as no surprise to many on the grapevine who have been reporting on it regularly over the past several weeks while most of the Rumors staff was on leave or sabbatical….many in the community expressed great enthusiasm for the new machines which form the backbone of Apple’s family of Macs.


The new iMacs sport an enclosure and display panels (20in 1680×1050 and 24in 1920×1200) which look on the surface, as well as on paper, identical to the previous generation but according to some of our oldest and most reliable sources at the highest levels within Cupertino’s Mac Hardware engineering division.

There is a lot more going on here than meets the eye in this latest update, even if you dig deep into Apple’s published specs so far. Read more

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Future macs to include coprocessor chips?

Apple recently made a bid for PA Semi, a semiconductor design company specializing in high performance, low power processors. The company is a licensee of IBMs POWER architecture, previously used by Apple as the PowerPC chip line, leading some to believe that Apple may be moving its Mac line back to PowerPC chips.

The truth however is less dramatic. Apple may be working on differentiating its hardware lineup by including discrete coprocessors for tasks such as video encoding, graphics design acceleration, and other high performance applications.

This sort of acceleration has been possible for a while now with the OS X Acceleration Framework, which takes advantage of whatever hardware is available on a machine, like SSE or Altivec instructions, graphics processors such as the Intel GMA or Nvidia chips, and in the future, dedicated coprocessors. Read more

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Apple announces new Macbooks, Macbook Pros

As recently predicted by Rumors, Apple has updated the remainder of its laptop line-up following last month’s introduction of the Macbook Air.

Sporting powerful “Penryn” 45-nanometer mobile Core 2 Duo processors from 2.1 to 2.6GHz, these new laptops are poised to crush the competition and expand Apple’s market share considerably. Read on for specs, analysis and more details!

Both the Macbooks and MBP’s have received significant enclosure/industrial design tweaks — notably, both sport the same “modern raised-button” keyboard design as the Macbook Air and Apple’s latest stand-alone ‘board.

Most of the new laptops are build around the “standard” Penryn chip, running at 2.1-2.4GHz with 3MB of enhanced on-chip cache memory; as Rumors reported previously in this article about Penryn & future Macbook Air specs, this new cache is faster and more intelligent than previous Merom/Santa Rosa based designs which included 4MB of cache. Read more

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Apple updates iDevices – 16GB iPhone, 32GB iPod Touch

Today Apple announced relatively straightforward storage capacity upgrades for both of the “multi-touch” iDevices, doubling the standard versions of each to 16GB and 32GB for the iPhone and iPod Touch, respectively.

Other than the storage space upgrades, according to reliable sources in Cupertino, the new iDevices use a somewhat different type of Flash storage that should offer substantial transfer performance improvements (especially for large files, since part of the difference is better buffering and sustained stream optimizations, as well as some improvements in the loading of large numbers of small {1024K or less} files — such as in a Web browser’s cache).

Overall, the iPod Touch should see between 50 and 300% depending on the size of the file, and an average of about 75-125% faster when syncing typical-sized MP3/AAC songs to the iPod. Read more

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Apple seeds 10.5.2 build 9C23; massive 500MB

Following our recent report on the “Mac Pro build” of OS X Leopard, 9C16 and recent seeds of 10.5.2, Apple has posted a new seed for third party developers to evaluate, 9C23. The already extremely lengthy changelist and fast-growing update package is now over well into the hundreds of megabytes and could eventually exceed 400MB(!), making it the single largest point update to OS X ever.

Depending on whether one is updating a PowerPC or Intel Mac, packages could vary from 250 to upwards of 400MB in size, and some on the grapevine believe its final weigh-in could be very close to five hundred megabytes.

Either way, it will be a huge download and there has been a lot of debate at Infinite Loop, according to reliable sources, as to whether the update should be split into multiple packages (the core system update, and individual updates to applications or components), hold back some changes for Security Updates that will follow shortly after the point upgrade…..or a more unusual solution, such as offering the update with a nominal pricetag of a few dollars on a CD-ROM disk for purchase at the Apple Store, to ease the burden on modem users or others for whom such a massive download is impractical. Read more

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Posted in Apple Software | Tagged | 14 Responses