Promises, promises

It's been an interesting week for Apple watchers, full of promise. Promise in all sorts of ways: in future Mac hardware that will really take advantage of the goodness incipient in OS 10.6.x Snow Leopard, and hardware promises in the iPod touch: where's the camera? A tear-apart clearly showed there was space for one. But there's even more promise than that.

I've been saying for a while that Apple needs to update its iMac line. Well, 'needs' might be too strong a word. It may just be my own hope, I must admit.

For perhaps Apple doesn't 'need' to release a new iMac. Maybe it's only me who wants one. Since no magical Apple tablet/netbook/thingy has showed up to fill a perceived device gap underneath Apple's MacBook range (despite sometimes fervid speculation), and despite no new iMac, Apple's Mac computer sales have still managed to rise recently - in the US, anyway.

Industry watcher the Silicon Alley Insider has reported on data from the research firm NPD showing that US Mac sales were up 7 per cent year-over-year for July and August. Needless to say, this is ahead of most analysts' projections.

Aren't Macs 'overpriced' already? Isn't there a recession on? Despite the odds, Apple still seems almost unaware of recession woes. (Back-to-school sales in the first few months of this quarter would have helped the figures.)

Meanwhile, HP seems to be envious. While not exactly building 'green' PCs, HP has placed an 'Envy' moniker on its latest notebooks. I wouldn't think anything of that except that PC World (not a Mac site) reckons HP is trying to get "as close to replicating a MacBook Pro is it could without stamping an Apple logo on the classy aluminum [sic] chassis."

Whatever, the only Mac computers currently available that really benefit from the new processing tech in Snow Leopard are great big Mac Pro towers with lots of RAM and lots of processing and video power. In the Snow Leopard climate, it stands to reason a multi-core iMac with a really good video card would be a justifiable offering.

And then there are the products Apple has released lately. According to iFixit, the site that regularly gets new Apple equipment as close as possible to release, then pulls it apart, there is a hole in the board where the camera would be if there was one.

At the same time, Microsoft is set to roll out its new Zunes. Spec for spec, even us Apple fans have to admit the new Zune HD looks good. On paper.

Ginny Miles at PC World has written that the new Zune HD, which replaces all other previously released models of Microsoft's player, got a complete makeover.

It has a 3.3-inch multi-touch OLED display and has a single, slim hardware home button lying below it. Sound familiar? Microsoft says the Zune HD can play music for up to 33 hours and video for up to 8.5 hours, which is impressive. The iPod Touch offers 30 hours of music playback and 6 hours of video.

Macworld, quoting a PC World article (the two magazines are under the same publisher), reckons other iPod competitors are also closing in.

And then there's the 'missing' capabilities inside the new iPod touch. iFixit speculates that, at the very least, a iPod Nano type 640x480 video-only camera would fit nicely in a space left in the new touch, and leaked pictures of prototype iPod touch cases did clearly show a lens hole.

Steve Jobs said that the camera was left out to make the iPod touch an inexpensive, affordable gaming device. Hmm, what do you think? I bet that camera doesn't cost much. It's already in the cheaper nanos. It smacks more of some technical issue we don't know about, to my mind.

The new touch CPU is a 339S0075 ARM. This appears to be a higher/newer CPU, and an improvement over the previous iPod, and better even than the iPhone 3GS' processor.

But there's even more promise in that latest iPod touch case. iFixit's tear-down also revealed a Broadcom BCM4329FKUBG wireless chip. According to Broadcom's own data, the BCM4329 supports the 802.11n wireless protocol, sure, but it also supports FM radio transmission and reception. All three of these features are currently not active in the iPod touch.

Even the iPhone 3GS doesn't yet support the newer, faster 802.11n protocol, which has finally been ratified fully by the IEEE. The iPhone 3GS only has a BCM4325 wireless chip, which supports 802.11 a/b/g but not /n.

But Apple hasn't even mentioned these potential functions in the touch, even though the lower-priced nano has FM radio. A software patch or a new OS 3x could enable these features, assuming the touch contains a suitable antenna.

What's Apple waiting for that will prompt the enabling of FM radio? With transmission, an iPod touch could link to a car stereo, for example, without using any third party hardware. If reception is enabled in the touch, you can listen to FM radio broadcasts as with a transistor radio of old, and with some cell phones and even the new nano.

I guess we'll find out one day.

In other Mac news, Mac OS X Snow Leopard has already moved to version 10.6.1, only 13 days after Snow Leopard's release. This addresses some printer driver compatibility, random issues with DVD playback, some issues with Mail and certain SMTP servers, and compatibility with Motion 4 (the 3D component in Final Cut Studio).

OS 10.6.1 also includes the latest 10.0.32.18 version of Adobe's Flash Player plug-in.

Security Update 2009-005 came out too, addressing potential security vulnerabilities. Snow Leopard users, just run Software Update - think of it as a vaccination against potential malware.

- Mark Webster mac.nz

 

PHOTO: Apple's new video camera-toting Nano on display. Photo / AP