Ippoippo

No, not the software kind of updates…

A fair bit of Apple news came out overnight. The big announcement was that Steve Jobs will now be taking a 6 month medical break, and that Tim Cook will assume his role at Apple.

(Guardian, another Guardian story and the Independent)

Now, I hope Jobs does recover from whatever he has got, but boy has this whole thing been badly handled by Apple.

Other Apple news

Some financial results have now come out, and there was some interesting little stats.
What was of interest is that Acer grew by 55% compared to this time last year. Now, Acer is a big player in the ‘netbook’ category of laptop computers.
Apple has not expressed an interest into going into this area, which a lot of Apple geeks on various forums seem to think is madness. Perhaps now, after seeing these figures, Apple may change their mind.

Currently, we have two iMacs. Yuko has one, which also acts as the TV in the living room. I have an iMac in the study for my OU work, geeking around and acting as a secondary TV recording device. Having got rid of my MacBookPro, I must admit I would like to have a ‘netbook’ which I can take with me to OU tutorials. They are energy efficient, and it would be an ideal portable device. People have (illegally) hacked OS X onto these Asus, MSI and other similar machines. So, it shouldn’t be that difficult for Apple to make an official one.

UPDATE: Turns out that the Acer figures may be distorted because Acer purchased Gateway in the last year. Would be interesting to see the Acer stats minus sales inherited from Gateway.

Pointless, and somewhat geeky. But, hey, it’s quite cool. [Site is in Japanese, but the pics say it all]

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Good old Onion!

At long last, it looks like iTunes is going DRM free.
Apple have been wanting to do this for some time now, with Steve Jobs publishing an open letter called ‘Thoughts on Music’ indicating that the record companies should ditch DRM.
The issue was that the record companies tried using DRM free music with other retailers (such as Amazon) in an attempt to cut Apple down to size. They prevented Apple for switching to DRM free, well certainly with Apple wanting to keep to US$0.99 singles tracks.
However, it looks like Apple compromised on the cost of tracks, but the big record companies have also seen that iTunes will probably remain the dominant player in the market.

Ummm, that isn’t renewable!!

Somebody has come up with an idea to utilise the gas pressure in the gas mains system to generate extra electricity.
Technically, sounds quite a good idea. However, this little bit of marketting/greenwash type comment somewhat annoyed me…

Andrew Mercer of company 2OC, which has developed the “geo-pressure” technology, said: “We’re very lucky that somebody else has built this pipeline infrastructure. We can borrow it to produce renewable energy.“

Ummm, how is this renewable? When the gas runs out, since it’s not a renewable energy source, then there’s no pressure! All this is doing is effectively increasing the efficiency of the distribution system, utilising (kinetic) energy that would have otherwise been wasted.