Apple refreshes the iMac line with expected upgrades

Now powered by 6MB of L2 cache, the iMacs now use the latest revision of the Intel CPUs. The highest end of the line includes an iMac powered by a 3.06GHz Processor and an 8800GS nVidia GPU.

At 0.94″ thickness, this is one desktop computer that everyone has their eyes on. Specially after seeing TV shows like Gateway advertise them so well.

Apple iTunes now the leading music retailer in the US

Apple has surpassed Walmart to become the leading music vendor in the United States. They also have the largest music catalog of six million songs. The iTunes Music Store was started five years ago and they have created a strong footprint in the music industry.

This is not surprising, Apple was bound to get this share sooner or later with the increasing worldwide popularity of iPod music players that sync with the popular iTunes Digital Jukebox application that Apple develops for Macintosh and Windows computers.

Photoshop CS4 to go 64 bit on Windows

That’s great news. But the other half of what’s new is that we’ll be sticking to the 32 bit version on Mac OS X. Sad news from Adobe considering that Windows 64-bit isn’t even that popular, while Mac OS X Leopard has only one version- that’s 64-bit.

Adobe’s argument is fairly reasonable: Apple decided to discontinue the 64-bit Carbon, to promote development of 64-bit Cocoa applications. Now they wont be able to port the 64-bit Carbon Photoshop CS4 to 64-bit Cocoa Photoshop CS5 as initially planned, but what does seem likely is a 64-bit Cocoa build of Photoshop CS5 as indicated. Microsoft’s Office 2008 is still Carbon, and that’s exactly what John Nack explains by saying Adobe cannot possibly create the 64-bit Cocoa application in such a short time frame.

Acid3 Test

Opera and WebKit successfully pass the Acid3 test with 100/100 scores. That is something Firefox has been unable to reach as yet. This news comes as a shock to the community that supports and swears by open source software. Anyhow, we’ll soon see the two extremely standards compliant browsers: Apple’s WebKit based Safari and Opera web browsers.

 

The biggest shocker is not that the engines have beaten Firefox but that such standards compliance is nowhere to be seen on Linux as yet. I don’t think Mozilla is going to sit quite though. At least, I hope not.

No bundled remote

The Apple remote that previously shipped with all the computers in the MacBook line is no longer part of the package. With the latest processor refresh, Apple has chosen to keep the Apple remote aside calling it an additional and optional accessory.

What good is Front Row without that gem of a device that looks somewhat like the 1st generation iPod Shuffle. Companies make intelligent decisions to cut costs, this isn’t one of them.