09/15/02

Some GeForce2Mx available for your Cube or your Powermac.

If you want to upgrade to Jaguar and need a Quartz Extreme compatible video card, our partner Mac-Pro has 5 GeForce2MX (product ID : NMGI) available for $169,95. Since that item is now quite rare, you should hurry!

Apple Expo Paris Coverage : pictures of the Expo (part V)

The Expo closed its doors yesterday evening. Here are the last pictures that we took. Some of them are requests made by our readers.

You can see :

09/14/02

Apple Expo Coverage : Xserve-Raid to be released before the end of the year.

According to Jon Rubinstein, interviewed by the new French weekly Mac magazine called Mac-Info, Apple will release an Xserve-Raid (the picture is here) before the end of the year. This Raid system, shown on the Apple booth for the first time, can handle 14 hard drives (1.68 Terabytes). Jon Rubinstein also said that Xserve is selling well. New customers are buying those servers. Most of them buy two to five servers in order to see if they work well.

The Xserve. Click on the thumbnail to see a bigger picture.

09/12/02

Apple Expo Paris Coverage : pictures of the Expo (part IV)

Today we are showing you pictures of products of smaller companies than Apple or Microsoft.

You can see : "JBL creature" self powered satellite speakers and subwoofer, from Harman Multimedia, the Sonnet 1 Ghz G4 upgrade card, PowerBooks keybord protection (2 pictures), the iCurve stand from Griffin, some music software (Plugsound), Vue d'Esprit (3D software), ATI 9000 Pro and 9700 Pro, and some Griffin products (iCurve again, PowerMate, Pro speaker breakout cable and iMic)

Apple Expo Special on Powerlogix dual and single processor cards.

Our partner Macs4all is offering Cube-Zone readers free shipping on ground orders of Powerlogix cards or a $10 credit for International orders if they mention free shipping during checkout. This discount is only valid during the Apple-Expo. Here are the cards :

09/11/02

Apple Expo Paris Coverage : pictures of the Expo (part III)

Our coverage continues. In those pictures, you can see the game area with dual towers, the Sony booth, the Microsoft booth, the Apple booth, some real Apple on sticks, the Corel booth and the Iomega booth.

Readers feedback

"Doesn't OS 9, even as Classic, require a PPC processor? as I understood it, it is not really "emulation" but the actual OS running inside-sorta-alongside OS X (pardon my technical terms...LOL), and requires a PPC. do you know of some new emulation box that does not? can an AMD or other foreign processor architecture support PPC emulation? thanx! J "

Theoretically it does.... However, why couldn't it be used as Virtual PC?

"Hello, In your discussion of the recent decision for Apple to ship all 2003 Macs without the ability to boot into Mac OS 9, you say: "Mac OS X is portable. It can run on x86 chips and on RISC chips. Mac OS 9 cannot. The conclusion is obvious : it is quite easy to have a compatibility box called Classic, even if the processor was an AMD chip, for instance. But it would not work with a "real" Mac OS 9." I don't think you'd be able to get the Classic environment working on an x86 chip. It has all the same dependencies on Mac hardware that the full Mac OS 9 does. Let me ask you this: how is it that Mac OS 9 cannot run on x86 chips yet the "compatibility box called Classic" could? I think a more likely reason is that Apple wants to instill some confidence into developers about what platform they should develop their software for. Regards, Krishen"

Well there is already a Mac emulator on PC... that runs very well... It is not made by Apple..and I don't remember the name of the company that makes it...but it works

09/10/02

Apple Expo Paris Coverage : pictures of the Expo (part II)

Here is the traditional Apple booth, with the recent hardware products : iMac 17" TFT, iMac connected to video cameras, eMac and Powermacs dual.

Mac OS 9 is dead...and the G4 as well : what's behind the keynote announcements.

As you saw in our keynote coverage, Steve Jobs announced that new Macs won't boot with Mac OS 9 in 2003. What does that exactly mean? According to Steve Jobs, "We expect that 20 percent of our entire installed base will be using Mac OS X by the end of this year, (ie: 5 million copies sold) making it the fastest operating system transition in recent history."

Steve also said that it was complicated to maintain two different versions of an operating system. When some new hardware arrive on the market, Apple has to write two drivers instead of one in order to support Mac OS 9. And it is time consuming. So Steve has decided that the Macs sold in 2003 will only be able to boot with OS X. Basically, it means that if you try to boot from your OS 9 CD, it won't work.

What is behind that decision?

I'm sure everybody remembers when Steve Jobs said that, in 2003, Apple "will have options for processors".... And in order to have options, Apple had to kill OS 9. Mac OS X is portable. It can run on x86 chips and on RISC chips. Mac OS 9 cannot. The conclusion is obvious : it is quite easy to have a compatibility box called Classic, even if the processor was an AMD chip, for instance. But it would not work with a "real" Mac OS 9.

That announcement might be more important than we first thought. It could mean the end of the G4 as soon as 2003.

Readers feedback.

Apple Expo Paris Coverage : X-Serve in Paris

Here are some pictures of the X-Serve. In the third picture, you see some additional storage.

Apple Expo Paris Coverage : pictures of the Expo (part I)

Here are the first pictures that we have taken at the Expo. We have a lot more coming. Stay tuned.

What you can see here is the Apple booth, people in front of the new iMacs 17", the iSync banner, the Jaguar banner and the new iMac TFT 17".

The Expo is not really fascinating this year... However there are a lot of good offers for potential buyers. Just an example : an iPod 5 gig for only 238 euros, VAT included... (It is cheap for France.....).

Apple Expo Paris coverage : Steve Jobs' keynote very disappointing.

As predicted by a lot of rumors sites, there were no hardware announcements today. We don't have pictures of the keynote, since we did not have a VIP or press pass. Everybody else had to leave their camera, cell phones, laptops and other digital devices at the entrance, before the security check... Did the people at Apple think that something would happen to Steve Jobs if he did not announce anything?

Steve began his keynote with a ten minutes explanation of why the new iMac 17" and the new dual PowerMacs are the best computer ever, and why they try to always lower the price of Superdrive solutions.

Then he began a long presentation of Jaguar and related software. Here are the main points covered :