Apple does not seem to be able to resolve the on-going issue, and might lose much more on sales and image than the very little margin granted to APRs. IS Apple so greedy than it does not see that part of its current success was also built thanks to its APR network? A solution has to be found as both parts are losing currently losing money, customers and credibility. We are wondering, what is the current status of the APR network in USA, are they all gone as Apple retail stores network is much larger? How is the relation between US APR and Apple?

As with the Magic Mouse, it offers an entire touch-based surface, but unlike the product from Apple, it works with a dongle. Available for 69.99 USD (vs. 69 for the Magic Mouse) it does not seem to be there to directly compete with the mouse from Apple, as it is not compatible with Mac OS X for the moment; windows 7 users only so far.

on a display of 0.65" diagonal (1.55 cm), they successfully packed 5.4 millions pixels (RGB + 1 for white), so a record density if 2687 pixels/inch. It can display color images/video with a definition of 1280x1024 or in gray scale 2560x2048.

This product is currently dedicated to military and medical usages, but we can imagine that in a near future it could be used for some high-end/Pro DSLR cameras.

Trendnet tries to minimize the impact of such breach, but nevertheless psoted a dedicated webpage on its website to list all affected IP camera models as well as the availability of firmware update to solve this issue. If you own a Trendnet camera, you better check: http://www.trendnet.com/langen/press/view.asp?id=1958

[Update]
Trendnet posted information and list of affected products:
http://www.trendnet.com/products/features.asp?featureid=52

Here is the page to download updated firmwares:
http://www.trendnet.com/downloads/ 

Designed to be a portable model, the BP40NS20 is able to burn CD, DVD and BD, even the latest BDXL last version offering a storage space up to 100 GB.
Its price is also interesting, 143 USD, so less than half of the cost of the external SuperDrive available from Apple for Mac Book Air and Mac mini. We currently do not know if it would be possible to boot a Mac from such external drive with a Mac OS X DVD, but will Lion, such feature is not really important with the internet recovery procedure, and it could offer a nice way to read/write data for some Mac models.

• MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 2.3
• iMac EFI Update 1.8
• MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.6

• Bryce Pro 
• Hexagon (named Amapi some times ago) 
• DAZ Studio Pro (rendering application)

ihttp://www.daz3d.com/

Only thing you will need is to register for being able to download application for free.

Wayne, one of our readers, sent us interesting comments regarding the offer from DAZ:

Hey!

Not sure this is for one day or not. I got notice several days ago and downloaded software.

Readers should know that Bryce 7 Pro download is Ver. 7.1 and does not seem to work in Lion. I have tried on three different machines - desktops and laptops.

Looking at tech support it simply says there as known issues between Bryce 7 Pro and Lion. Try recommend Snow Leopard.

Other two programs seem to install and run just fine.

FYI - this includes Mac and PC versions with same serial numbers.
So my answer is to run Bryce 7 Pro inside Windows XP through Parallels 7.

• 42" 1080p LED flat panel display
• Incorporates Apple's operating system (iOS) found in its current Apple TV set top box which allows you to purchase and stream movies and other entertainment from the Internet
• Download and use apps from the App Store. Can you imagine playing Angry Birds on a big screen in your living room?
• Supports Apple's new iCloud service for storing your movies, TV shows, and music content that you've purchased from iTunes and beam them to your Apple HDTV.
• Use your iPad or iPhone as a remote control, and do everything from controlling your TV, to purchasing new shows and swapping content between your Apple devices and the iCloud service.
• Built-in convenience with built in iSight camera and microphone for Skype.
• In addition to iTunes, stream content from popular sites such as Netflix, YouTube, and Flickr.
• Available for $1499

While those details could have been obtained by compiling on-going rumors, it seems to make sense. Recent rumors quoted by “The globe and Mail” indicate a Siri-like voice-based remote control, a feature we were mentioning yesterday.

Unity Semiconductor will continue to develop CMOx under the umbrella of Rambus. It remains top be seen if this acquisition is really meant to be leading to a true business for Rambus around storage memory or if as in the past, the company is acquiring companies to strengthen its portfolio to have ammunition to launch lawsuit against other manufacturers for patent infringement; things that the company is in fact specialized for years... Rambus has probably more relationship with lawyers than with a R&D department...

NVidia seems to be VERY optimistic, as its flagship GTX680 is "claimed" to be 40% faster than the Radeon HD 7970... if this is true among all benchmarks, it would be a huge performance gap. But we can also postulate that it is true for only a particular setting or with a few specific benchmarking tests. However, what is already known is the price of such toy... 649 USD...
If the performance is real, it will remain to be seen if Apple is still considering NVidia for providing graphic cards for Mac Pro.

While Apple was most likely not behind such initiative, specifications are surprisingly rather precise, while it could have been also picked easily from all floating rumors on the web... Still missing is the Siri-like voice remote control that was surfacing few weeks ago on such hypothetical Apple HDTV set story/rumor.

While the  Xeon Sandy Bridge is not out yet, we start getting the first piece of information about its successor, known as Xeon Ivy-Bridge.

Thanks to a 22 nm engraving process, Intel will further increase the number of cores and transistors, and we should have CPU with up to 10 cores per die and 30 MB of cache (today, respectively 8 cores and 20 MB cache for Sandy Bridge)
With Ivy-Bridge, Intel seems to clearly define the gap between Xeon, aka CPU for serious workstation, and mainstream CPU. Xeon will have up to 10 cores per CPU, while desktop CPU will remain at 4 core/CPU, except the E series, dedicated to serious amateurs looking for more performance or rich users. Xeon will have cores, while desktop CPU will have optimized performance/watt ratio. The availability is predicted in less than one year (early 2013).

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The on-going patent dispute is related to claim from Motorola of its patents on 3G technologies. This patent is required for all mobile phone manufacturer, also named FRAND patent, so Motorola can not refuse to sell license, and it has to be at a reasonable price, otherwise the company could be sued by anti-trust authorities. The problem is that Motorola would like to claim up to 2.25% of revenues generated from sales of devices on which those patents apply.

Apple considers that Motorola strategy is to gain a monopoly position and to prevent competition to come on this market, and Cupertino is requesting Motorola to release details about licensing contracts signed with other mobile phone manufacturers in order to evaluate if 2.25% is fair, or just a tick from Motorola to cash in on Apple's successes.
So the dispute is far from being over between both companies, and it is also true between Apple and Samsung, considering that the European Commission is the ate case, has been launching investigation on Samsung's practices.

Seagate also announced that computer manufacturers are trying to sign long-term contract for securing plate-based HD supplies. In addition, Seagate is also planning to launch auction on batches of HDs, and will start with a test for 200,000 units in the coming weeks...

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Its name, Avid Studio, relatively powerful, it is available for 3.99 euros. This is probably a sort of legal Trojan, aiming to show users how video solution from Avid are competitive and can be better than the one available from Apple.

As you can see it, the new CPU is around 9% faster in average, with all benchmarking procedures, while its clock speed is only marginally higher 3%. Of course we could have expected more, but we should remember that the main innovation with the Ivy-Bridge is the 3D engraving at 22-nm. It will allow higher clock speed and lower power consumption (higher frequency in the coming months too).
Last but not least, those figures are only for the CPU part of the processor, the graphical performance will be most likely tested later on in more details, but from already available figures, it is much more powerful than the one found in current Sandy-Bridge.

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Apple becomes the world third mobile phone manufacturer for the last quarter and overall 2011. This is for all type on mobile phone units, figures would be different for Smartphone, where Apple would be first or second, depending on analysts, fighting with Samsung for the crone.

On the legal aspect, Ebizcuss decided to sue Apple for its business practices (more broad complain), at the Business Court of Paris, while bringing the case to the European customer Council with the support of other French and European APRs. As a reminder, this is the Council that fined Intel and Microsoft couples of months and years ago (part of the European Commission). The maximum fine is 10% of the company yearly revenues.

In summary, it seems that we have reached a point of no return between Apple and its main historical APR network in Europe, even though small APRs will never openly complain too loudly. The network of Apple Retail Stores starts to develop further in Europe, ruining investments made by some local APRs when entering in competition in the same geographical locations. In addition, Apple has put on hold the installation of additional ARPs in all European large and mid-size cities, most likely to avoid frontal fight with APRs as the company plans to move full steam to develop its retail network in Europe. Decision from the European Commission on Apple practices might be the last move of the largest APRs before they drop weapons if Apple wins. If the EC fines Apple, it will be a huge victory and Apple would be forced to change its strategy and the way it intends to deal wit hits historical network of resellers, the one that has supported sales of Apple products during the dark years.

AMD then released the mainstream model aiming to backup the flagship unit, and know as HD 7950. If it has less processing cores, the ratio performance/price is excellent and it brings full muscle for the buck.

In addition, it is rather easy to overclock it, and can provide same performance level than its sister HD 7090. Thanks to a lower voltage, the HD 7950 is also a card providing the best performance per watt ratio.

But it might remain too expensive to have it by default in our future Mac Pro, beside as a costy BTO option. We cannot wait to see the new Mac Pro.

AMD then released the mainstream model aiming to backup the flagship unit, and know as HD 7950. If it has less processing cores, the ratio performance/price is excellent and it brings full muscle for the buck.

In addition, it is rather easy to overclock it, and can provide same performance level than its sister HD 7090. Thanks to a lower voltage, the HD 7950 is also a card providing the best performance per watt ratio.

But it might remain too expensive to have it by default in our future Mac Pro, beside as a costy BTO option. We cannot wait to see the new Mac Pro.

Available around 400-450 USD, it starts to be available in Japan and in some other countries. Surprisingly it is composed of 5 plates of 800 GB instead of the expected 4 x 1 GB. This difference will most likely generate higher heat release as well as power consumption. This choice might have been driven by the need of 1 GB plates for producing 3 TB HD based on 3 plates. It might evolve in the future, and Hitachi might silently evolve to the expected 4 x 1 TB when production of all type of HD will be back to normal.

It seems that such reactions drove Apple back to the lab and to reconsider its work. At the same time the company sent its product specialists out into the video editing community to have more detailed feedbacks, get a clear picture of the reactions and to reassure customers that Apple would bring back some of the most needed features and is committed to support the Pro video community. 

With the release of FCP X 10.0.3, Apple just surprised again (positively) the entire editing community by bringing back everything that was expected and even more. Many users who abandoned FCP X might want to reconsider or feel they might have made an unfortunate hasty move.

More on this topic from the excellent article from http://www.macworld.com

As a consequence of the very aggressive move of Samsung on the legal field, the European Commission decided to investigate the strategy and lawsuits launched by the Korean company. In summary, the EC probes Samsung over possible patent rights abuses, and more extensively will launch an antitrust investigation into Samsung. This is a major hit for Samsung and might end up in a huge fine... remember Microsoft and Intel had to pay nearly 1 billion Euros or more...

It offers an iOS like presentation and helps to track number and type of peripheral connected. AirPort Base Station and Time Capsule Firmware Update 7.6.1 has also be released. this update is supposed to fix a wireless performance issue with iCloud:

This update is for all 802.11n AirPort Express, 802.11n AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule models. It fixes an issue with wireless performance and provides support for remote access to an AirPort disk or a Time Capsule hard drive with an iCloud account.

The future version of VLC, aka TwoFlower or 2.0, brings numerous improvement and modifications specific to Mac OS X. Thanks to the effort of Felix and numerous coder and designer, the team was able to continue the development of VLC on Mac OS X. If several bugs will remain to be fixed, the future new version will bring a lot of new features:

• New Interface
  The most obvious difference with TwoFlower will be the new interface. This is a single window design to stick with current Mac OS X standard. Two colors will be available, black one for the Mac OS X style and gray for the Lion style. With Mac OS X 10.7, it will be possible to select between the classic full screen mode of VLC and the Lion full screen mode.
  The audio and video filters are now available from the HUD.

• Extensions
  Supports for new windows and features such as integration of IMDB, Wikipedia, OpenSubtitles and others.

• Peripherals
  So far on Mac OS X, it was only possible to use the integrated webcam as a video source. With VLC 2.0, generic support for QKit peripherals has been added for audio (QTSound) and for video (QTCapture). It will allou to view and stream USB or FireWire external webcams, as well as microphones DVB and SDI cards.
  Regarding Blu-ray support, VLC 2.0 allows to access files on non-encoded media for Linux and Windows. It could be ported to Mac OS X. For encrypted media, the libaacs library is NOT ported to Mac OS X yet, if anyone want to contribute, you are welcome!

• Codecs
  The MacOS X version of VLC 2.0 will benefit from the same support and availability than the other platforms. The main new feature will be the support for multithreading deciding, bringing access to the power sitting in multicore hardware models running Mac OS X. New codecs are supported: ProRes, AVC/Intra,  codecs 10bits and some version of WMV. Support for MKV and MOV have been dramatically improved. GPU-based decoding on Mac OS X, is not ready to be release immediately, it will come later on.

• Video output
  The video output in Open GL has been modified, simplified and improved. Subtitles are now rendered according to the size of the displayed window, independently of the source and fully implemented in Open GL. This process improves quality and sharpness of subtitles.

• Support for OS X and PowerPC
  This version 2.0 is compatible with Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion.
  The 64-bits version is the priority version for Snow Leopard and Lion, as it is the only one providing native full screen support on Lion. The 32-bits version also works on Leopard.
  There is still a PPC version for Leopard, only tested on G5 hardware. It also allows multhreading decoding in HD format, however, it is possible that the next major evolution of VLC will not be supporting PPC-based hardware.

• The future
  Several options are currently discussed: complete the work on the interface, get prepared to fix the bug to be identified with the first version, work on the Blu-ray support as it remains too weak/basic, add GPU-based decoding, migrate the license from VLCKit to LGPL in order to give freedom to develop non-GPL applications on the top of the VLC engine.

You can download one of the Mac OS X version from the following url:

http://download.videolan.org/pub/testing/vlc-2.0.0-rc1/macosx/

The future version of VLC, aka TwoFlower or 2.0, brings numerous improvement and modifications specific to Mac OS X. Thanks to the effort of Felix and numerous coder and designer, the team was able to continue the development of VLC on Mac OS X. If several bugs will remain to be fixed, the future new version will bring a lot of new features:

• New Interface
  The most obvious difference with TwoFlower will be the new interface. This is a single window design to stick with current Mac OS X standard. Two colors will be available, black one for the Mac OS X style and gray for the Lion style. With Mac OS X 10.7, it will be possible to select between the classic full screen mode of VLC and the Lion full screen mode.
  The audio and video filters are now available from the HUD.
• Extensions
  Supports for new windows and features such as integration of IMDB, Wikipedia, OpenSubtitles and others.
• Peripherals
  So far on Mac OS X, it was only possible to use the integrated webcam as a video source. With VLC 2.0, generic support for QKit peripherals has been added for audio (QTSound) and for video (QTCapture). It will allou to view and stream USB or FireWire external webcams, as well as microphones DVB and SDI cards.
  Regarding Blu-ray support, VLC 2.0 allows to access files on non-encoded media for Linux and Windows. It could be ported to Mac OS X. For encrypted media, the libaacs library is NOT ported to Mac OS X yet, if anyone want to contribute, you are welcome!
• Codecs
  The MacOS X version of VLC 2.0 will benefit from the same support and availability than the other platforms. The main new feature will be the support for multithreading deciding, bringing access to the power sitting in multicore hardware models running Mac OS X. New codecs are supported: ProRes, AVC/Intra,  codecs 10bits and some version of WMV. Support for MKV and MOV have been dramatically improved. GPU-based decoding on Mac OS X, is not ready to be release immediately, it will come later on.
• Video output
  The video output in Open GL has been modified, simplified and improved. Subtitles are now rendered according to the size of the displayed window, independently of the source and fully implemented in Open GL. This process improves quality and sharpness of subtitles.
• Support for OS X and PowerPC
  This version 2.0 is compatible with Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion.
  The 64-bits version is the priority version for Snow Leopard and Lion, as it is the only one providing native full screen support on Lion. The 32-bits version also works on Leopard.
  There is still a PPC version for Leopard, only tested on G5 hardware. It also allows multhreading decoding in HD format, however, it is possible that the next major evolution of VLC will not be supporting PPC-based hardware.
• The future
  Several options are currently discussed: complete the work on the interface, get prepared to fix the bug to be identified with the first version, work on the Blu-ray support as it remains too weak/basic, add GPU-based decoding, migrate the license from VLCKit to LGPL in order to give freedom to develop non-GPL applications on the top of the VLC engine.

You can download one of the Mac OS X version from the following url:

SanDisk announced to have produced MLC and X3 flash memory chips with a 19 nm engraving process, while most of the high-production lines are currently at 24 nm. The company expects to bring such 19 nm-based products during 2012.
However it remains to be tested and demonstrated that the thinner process does not compromise the lifetime of the memory chips. Indeed, with MLC chips, each new generation with thinner process has seen the number of writing cycles to be reduced significantly when compared to the previous generation.
If the lifetime is reasonable and reliable, especially for X3 chips that OCZ wants to use for its mainstream products, it could bring the price of GB storage below the psychological limit of $1 per GB. It would definitely be the best way to attract more people to SSD and avoid that it remains a storage solution for an elite...