MacRumors

DigiTimes reports that Apple is amongst the vendors who are awaiting the release of three new low-power desktop CPUs due in January from Intel.

Intel will launch the Core 2 Quad Q8200s (2.33GHz/4MB L2), Core 2 Quad Q9400s (2.66GHz/6MB L2) and Core 2 Quad Q9550s (2.83GHz/12MB L2) with prices at US$245, US$320 and US$369, respectively in thousand-unit tray quantities. These CPUs will have the same specifications as standard CPUs with the same model number, but will see their TDP drop from 95W to 65W.

Apple is reported to have decided to launch products based on these CPUs. The most obvious destination for the new chips is Apple's iMac line which has been rumored for revision.

While the iMac's processor speeds would not increase with the use these chips, it would increase the number of CPU cores from two to four. Of note, Apple has historically used Intel's Mobile processors in the iMac and Mac Mini.

Macworld reports from the SuperComputing 08 conference which is taking place in Austin, Texas this week. The Khronos group was present to celebrate the launch of the upcoming OpenCL specification which Apple is planning to implement in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. OpenCL is a new programming interface (API) to allow developers to take advantage of parallel computing across graphics processing units (GPUs) and multi-core CPUs.

While few details were revealed, Khronos' president Neil Trevett explained how quickly the OpenCL specification had come together.

"If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it's quite normal for a standard to take five years or more," Trevett said. "That's quite commonplace. You actually have to really push to get it down to eighteen months. Our record was 12 months, up to now; we've done this one in six [OpenCL]."

The speed at which they completed the specification was due to Apple's tight schedule to allow it to ship with Snow Leopard. The specification is now being reviewed by lawyers for the next 30 days to make sure no intellectual property has been breached. The specification will presumably be complete once it passes this 30 day inspection.

Trevett was very optimistic about the prospects of OpenCL specifically implemented in Snow Leopard:

"If Apple ends up following through on the plans they stated on building this specification into Snow Leopard, I think you could see opportunity for imaging applications vendors, video application vendors to tap into the goodness of GPU hardware," Trevett said. "Everyone has a supercomputer locked away in their Mac, but it's hard to get at it. And OpenCL will unlock the potential of that supercomputer."

He also acknowledged that OpenCL would work from the cell phones to high end computers, leaving open the possibility that we could see OpenCL implemented in future iPhones.

Apple's Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is expected to ship in 2009 with recent hints suggesting the first quarter of 2009.

Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at LISA '08 last week. LISA (or Large Installation System Administration Conference) is a technical conference targeted at engineers and system administrators. This year's conference invited Apple's Jordan Hubbard to speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms. While technical readers may find the content of Hubbard's presentation slides (PDF) quite interesting, the most surprising revelation is a more specific target date for Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): 1st Quarter 2009.

When Apple first previewed Snow Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2008, they simply stated that Snow Leopard would ship "in about a year" from the announcement. A Q1 release would deliver it earlier than most had expected and makes it conceivable that we could see a demo or announcement at Macworld San Francisco 2009.

Apple has said that they would be focusing on both quality and performance in Snow Leopard. In particular, Apple has made it clear that there will be efforts to improve support for multi-core processors and GPU processing. These improvements will help developers more efficiently use these capabilities that already ship in Macs.

A California judge has dismissed a counterclaim from Psystar which asserted that Apple was violating federal and state anti-trust laws in limiting the sale and use of Mac OS X on Apple branded computers..

But in a 19-page order passed down on Tuesday, Judge William Alsup largely reject Psystar's claims and granted Apple's motion to have the countersuit thrown out of court should the clone maker not better its argument through an amended complaint that can be filed no later than Monday December 8th.

AppleInsider notes that Psystar attempted to define a "Mac OS market" in which Apple held a monopoly. Apple, of course, successfully disputed this definition of a "market" with which the judge agreed.

"Apple asks its customers to purchase Mac OS knowing that it is to be used only with Apple computers," he wrote. "It is certainly entitled to do so."

Psystar is a small company which sells a Mac clone using off-the-shelf PC parts and a modified version of Mac OS X Leopard. Apple sued Psystar over these products and that case is still pending.

MacRumors forum member Brett33 bought an "as is" MacBook Air on eBay for a selling price of $730. As it turns out, it appears the machine is actually a prototype model of Apple's MacBook Air.

After receiving the unit, Brett33 noticed that the bottom of the laptop was made of black aluminum and that the screen bezel did not have "MacBook Air" written on it. The laptop runs an interim build of Mac OS X 10.5 (8R4016).

The serial number on the machine indicates that it was built in May 2007, over six months before the MacBook Air was introduced. Another poster was able to specify that this model represented "M82 PROTO2 ENC 4", based on the serial number.

Though rare, prototype Apple machines have been known to circulate.

Apple's new unibody notebooks appear to incorporate a version of copy protection known as HDCP. HDCP is most well known for preventing unauthorized copying across HDMI but is also used for the DisplayPort which is found in Apple's new MacBooks, MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs.

High bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is a form of digital copy protection developed by Intel Corporation to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across DisplayPort, Digital Visual Interface (DVI), High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), Gigabit Video Interface (GVIF), or Unified Display Interface (UDI) connections, even if such copying would be permitted by fair use laws.

HDCP tries to prevent unauthorized transmission of protected digital content by only requiring HDCP to HDCP connections. Ars Technica describes how one unibody MacBook owner ran into this copy protection:

When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system.

In this case, the DisplayPort-to-VGA connection is not HDCP aware. As a result, the MacBook refused to play the video.

At this time, it appears only a portion of the iTunes movie content is HDCP encoded as some movies will playback without any issues. Apple has stated it plans on incorporating DisplayPort into all future Macs and Displays. The inclusion of HDCP/DisplayPort may shed some light onto Apple's comments about Blu-Ray licensing which was described as "a bag of hurt". Apple's inclusion of Blu-Ray playback into Macs could conceivably require support for HDCP.

Update: The Apple TV also supports HDCP over its HDMI connector.

Apple is now taking orders for their new 24" LED Cinema Display that was announced in October. While early versions of the new Cinema Display have been shown at Apple retail stores, orders had not been accepted until now.

Apple recently discontinued the 23" Apple Cinema Display to make way for the new LED screen.

The new screen introduces an LED backlight, iSight camera, speakers, and Mini DisplayPort. Rumors have suggested that Apple could be updating the rest of their Cinema Displays at Macworld San Francisco 2009 in January.

Lifehacker reports that Google's new Voice-Enabled Search application is now live in the App Store (sort of).

The new application is actually an update to Google's existing Google Mobile Application that is already available in the App Store. The version update adds Voice-Enabled search which was widely reported last week.

Users of the free application .... can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like Wheres the nearest Starbucks? or How tall is Mount Everest? The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Googles servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

While the new version has not yet propagated to the App Store's update notification service, when users download the application, they are given the new version. iPhone users who already have the Google Mobile Application installed will have to delete the application and re-download it to get the new version at this time.

App Store Link: Google Mobile Application, Free

Update: Google's Mobile Application has now been updated on Apple's servers, so existing users can simple update their application to get the new version.

As promised by Steve Jobs, Apple has issued a Trackpad Firmware Update to owners of the new MacBook and MacBook Pros:

This firmware update addresses an issue where trackpad clicks may not be recognized on MacBook (Late 2008) and MacBook Pro (Late 2008) systems.

The issue gained publicity after numerous complaints appeared on Apple's own discussion forum. A MacRumors reader subsequently received an email reply from Steve Jobs who revealed that a software fix was "coming soon."

NY Times reports on Intel's extensive testing of the Core i7 (Nehalem) processors which officially launched today. The company has invested over $500 million annually to test these chips in an effort to avoid any show-stopping bugs.

This cautious attitude comes from experience for Intel who recalled their Pentium chips in 1994 after a widely publicized bug in its floating point calculation unit.

After the Pentium flaw, Intel also fundamentally rethought the way it designed its processors, trying to increase the chance that its chips would be error-free even before testing. During the late 1990s it turned to a group of mathematical theoreticians in the computer science field who had developed advanced techniques for evaluating hardware and software, known as formal methods.

Even with such testing, Intel says it would be impossible to evaluate every possible scenario. As an additional safety net, Intel has included software in the Nehalem chips which can be changed after they ship.

Apple is expected to eventually adopt versions of Intel's Core i7 in future Macs.

Adobe and ARM have jointly announced that they are collaborating to optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR for ARM Powered devices.

The collaboration is expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on ARM platforms to bring rich Internet applications and Web services to mobile devices and consumer electronics worldwide.

This optimization is targeted at the existing ARM11 family (used in the iPhone) and will be available in the second half of 2009. Details are rather sparse, though the implication appears to be that this "optimization" will deliver Adobe Flash to existing mobile devices that are based on the latest ARM platforms.

PCMag further specifies that "devices with at least 200 MHz processors, more than around 16 Mbytes of RAM and a 'completely capable [Web] browser' will be able to render Web-based Flash content." Apple's iPhone, of course, fits into all these categories, which raises the question whether or not this could finally deliver Flash functionality to the current iPhone.

In March, Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone was not capable of supporting the full version of Flash.

As Jobs put it Tuesday during the company's annual shareholder meeting, Apple's iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.

Still, in the end, it will be left to Apple to decide about allowing Flash onto the iPhone. At present, the iPhone SDK terms prevent Adobe from launching a fully integrated version of Flash for the iPhone on its own.

One item we missed reporting on last week was the release of the 1.0.3 iPod Nano update for the 4th generation iPod Nanos. The list of fixes and changes include (via TUAW):

- Support for Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic
- Support for Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic
- Fixed instability issues when using Nike + iPod Sport Kit
- Added a setting to turn off Cover Flow when rotating iPod nano and a Cover Flow menu item under the Music menu
- When Shuffle setting is set to Songs, pressing play on a song in saved Genius playlist will now follow the Shuffle setting
- After playing a slideshow with TV out, Cover Flow album art is no longer distorted
- Waking iPod nano after hibernating no longer distorts photos
- Other minor bug fixes

We've heard hints suggesting that Apple's new In-Ear headphones will be shipping soon.

This software update should appear when connecting your 4th generation iPod nano to iTunes.

According to the most recent seed notes at HMBT.org, Apple may be trying to wrap up development of Mac OS X 10.5.6.

The latest Mac OS X 10.5.6 seed (9G38) provided to developers today lists no remaining issues. It's always difficult to predict when Apple plans on delivering the final version to end users, but having no known issues is usually considered a sign of pending release. The previous seed was published just earlier this week.

Again, Apple appears to be focusing on MobileMe sync testing for portable computers. In addition 98 other bug fixes are detailed within the published seed notes. Apple released the last update to Mac OS X 10.5 in September.