MacRumors

Appleinsider claims that Apple will be adopting Intel's upcoming "Menlow" Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform for multiple new devices in 2008.

Menlow incorporates a 45-nanometer low-power "Silverthorne" chip that promises to utilize only between half a watt to 2 watts of electrical power, making it ideal for future mobile phones and ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs). Other features to be included in the platform include WiFi, 3G, and WiMAX technologies.

Menlow is expected to be delivered by Intel in the 1st half of 2008. Appleinsider is uncertain when Apple will announce products based on the new platform, but suggests that it is under consideration for next-generation iPhones or in the rumored Apple tablet/PDA.

DigiTimes had previously disclosed that Apple was looking into Intel's most advanced mobile system-on-a-chip, Moorestown. Intel claims Moorestown will be even more efficient than the Menlow platform, however it isn't due until 2009.

Ultra-mobile PCs were in the spotlight in early 2006 when Microsoft revealed their Origami Project which introduced a line of UMPCs into the marketplace. The adoption of such mobile devices has so far been limited.

A Computerworld article provides reaction from ThinkSecret's lawyer on today's announcement that ThinkSecret had settled with Apple and would no longer be published.

Terry Gross of Gross & Belsky LLP told Computerworld, "The First Amendment has prevailed and every Internet journalist should feel some strength from what's happened", claiming that it was clear that Apple was going to lose if they continued to pursue the case. Gross goes on to state that it was settled because Nick Ciarelli was ready to move on to other projects after running ThinkSecret for the past 9 years, since age 13.

Gross challenges that he "would have loved for Apple to go forward on this" and that "Apple would have caved."

In an earlier statement to MacRumors, Ciarelli had said "I'm very satisfied with the settlement".

The US Patent Office has revealed a number of recent patent filings by Apple.

The first notable filing deals with automatic shutdown of a device and/or host after certain conditions are met, such as after a portable media player's battery is finished charging, or after a file transfer is complete. Apple suggests a scenario where an iPod or iPhone is plugged into an iMac to charge, but the user wishes for both to go to sleep or shutdown after the charge is complete (which may take several hours). The application, #20070294546, initially filed June 19, 2006 was made public today.

The other filing, patent application #20070288886, deals with attempts to fight software piracy.

A digital rights management system permits an application owner to cause code to be injected into the application's run-time instruction stream so as to restrict execution of that application to specific hardware platforms. In a first phase, an authorizing entity (e.g., an application owner or platform manufacturer) authorizes one or more applications to execute on a given hardware platform. Later, during application run-time, code is injected that performs periodic checks are made to determine if the application continues to run on the previously authorized hardware platform. If a periodic check fails, at least part of the application's execution string is terminated--effectively rendering the application non-usable. The periodic check is transparent to the user and difficult to circumvent.

Apple has thus-far resisted industry trends towards activation of software, and currently only uses such methods in some of its most costly professional software. While it is clear that Apple has been working on methods to combat piracy, it remains to be seen how far Apple will employ the methods in its software. Readers are reminded that only a portion of the applications filed end up making it to shipping products.jeff

is this the same http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/10/0022201?

arn

no... new patent.

Macenstein publishes a screenshot from the latest build of Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 that reveals that Apple has included a List-View into Stacks. Stacks is a file organization feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Users are also given the option of displaying a traditional Folder icon instead of the "stack" of icons in the Dock. These changes address a number of criticisms about Apple's initial Stacks implementation:

There's just not enough room in a single Dock tile for a stack of icons to convey any meaningful information. Only the top one, two, maybe three items have any visual impact. And those few items may be misleading (e.g., the home folder appearing to be the Desktop folder) or completely generic (e.g., the Pictures and Movies folders showing up as plain folder icons.) Seriously, Apple, this is a bad idea.

Mac OS X 10.5.2 was seeded to developers on Tuesday night. It is not yet available to the general public.

Apple has released 2 new iPod games, Peggle and Bomberman. (iTunes Links)

Peggle is published by Popcap and is also available as a free trial download for the Mac.

Apple has also made Pac-Man, Sims Bowling, and Sims Pool, previously only available for the 5th generation iPod, available for the iPod classic and 3rd generation iPod Nano as well.

Apple rumor site, ThinkSecret, issued a statement today indicating that they would no longer be published due to terms of a confidential settlement with Apple.

Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, said "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."

ThinkSecret has been one of the longest running Apple rumor sites, started in 1999. Apple sued ThinkSecret in January of 2005 for "posting Apple trade secrets and encouraging and inducing persons to provide product information in breach of agreements." Today's settlement brings a close to this lawsuit.

When contacted, Nick Ciarelli was unable to provide any further details but said, "I'm very satisfied with the settlement" and wished to thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation and his attorney, Terry Gross of Gross & Belsky, for their support.

An Apple Job listing (noted on Engadget) reveals that Apple is indeed working on multi-touch Mac hardware.

They are looking for a reliability engineer supporting Multi-touch panel development with Mac and iPod hardware groups. The job itself seems to involve high level quality assurance testing, but the involvement of the Mac hardware group seems to confirm that Apple is working to incorporate multi-touch technologies into future Macs.

This progression has been widely expected since the iPhone was first released, but this is the first (possible) indication from Apple.

9to5mac had previously suggested that the Apple sub-notebook might incorporate some of these features, but no further details have become available, so the timeframe for this integration remains speculative.

MacTech performed an exhaustive set of benchmarks comparing Parallels, VMWare Fusion and Boot Camp to run Windows on a Mac.

To tackle this problem, MacTech undertook a huge benchmarking project starting in September. The goal was to see how Boot Camp, VMware Fusion, and Parallels performed on different levels of Mac hardware, covering both Windows XP and Vista, and comparing that to a baseline PC running Windows.

Doing such an exhaustive comparison resulted in 19 configurations tested with over 2500 tests to be completed. They tested 3 different broad scenarios: one step tests, multi-step tasks between Mac OS X and Windows, and quantitiative benchmarks on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro and a Fujitsu Lifebook A6025.

One Step Tests: In XP, Parallels is 17% faster than VMWare Fusion on XP and 1% faster than Boot Camp. In Vista, VMware Fusion ran 46% slower than Boot Camp, and Parallels ran 44% slower than VMware Fusion.
Multi Step (Cross platform) Tasks: Parallels was 6x faster than VMWare on XP, and 5.2x faster on Vista.

A number of application specific benchmarks were also undertaken using Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer and more. These results are detailed in their article along with relevant graphs.

Their final conclusion, however, sums up the results as follows:

... both VMware Fusion and Parallels performed well, and were a good user experience. That said, Parallels was somewhat faster in general than VMware Fusion for XP. If you want the best virtualization performance for Vista, then VMware Fusion is your choice.

Of course, if you are not interested in coexistance with Mac OS X, naturally, Boot Camp is your best option.

Note: both Parallels and VMware Fusion have been updated since these benchmarks were performed. Since VMware has multi-core support, the author speculates that specific multi-core tasks may perform better on VMware than Parallels, but these scenarios were not tested. In the tests they did perform, however, they saw no speed advantage from VMware's multicore support. That being said these earlier Crave benchmarks suggest that the VMware multicore support is a substantial advantage when performing their multimedia multitasking test.

Apple has seeded developers with two updates tonight.

The first is the Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C7) update which lists fixes to 76 distinct issues. Bug fixes range from memory leaks, various printing issues, SMB support and more. Apple issued Mac OS X 10.5.1 in November and has recently updated retail copies of Leopard to include the full 10.5.1 version. A Page 2 rumor pegs the Mac OS X 10.5.2 final release at Macworld Expo in January.

Next, Apple has finally seeded Java SE 6 Preview 8 for Leopard. Apple had been secretive about the Java 6 support for Leopard and the product launch was met with disappointment amongst Java developers hoping for support for the latest version. Tonight's release provides an implementation of Sun's Java SE 6 for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and includes Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_01. This latest seed requires a 64-bit capable Intel-powered Mac and is described as having received only limited testing thus far.

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Macworld Expo 2008 Exhibitors - Macworld Expo 2008 is upon us. MacRumors will be providing our traditional MacRumorsLive keynote coverage as well as expanded exhibitor coverage this year. In MacRumors-style, instead of exhaustive coverage of every new product, we will only focus on a few of stand-out products. If your company would like to be considered to potentially reach some of our 3.9 million unique monthly visitors, please contact us via our web form with the subject of "Macworld Exhibitor" and company/contact information. Any press embargoes will be honored. For readers, our MacRumorsLive coverage will be back with notable improvements based on previous feedback.

MacRumors MWSF Reader Meetup - If you are interested in joining us in a casual meetup at Macworld, please express your interest in this forum poll. The meetup would take place in the evening on Monday, January 14th.

MacUpdate End of Sale, Price Increasing - MacUpdate's Mac App Bundle is coming to a close, with only 2 days left. Three new applications have been included, bringing the total number of applications to 13. Pricing has started to increase gradually as the deadline approaches, so now is the time if you are considering this bundle. (MacRumors is a promotional partner of MacUpdate's and sales of this bundle support this site.)

Apple has released MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1 today which addresses a keyboard-freezing issue seen by many MacBook and MacBook Pro users under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard:

This update addresses a responsiveness issue on MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers. Some MacBook and MacBook Pro systems may occasionally experience a temporary suspension of keyboard input which can last a minute or longer. The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is required before installing the MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1.

There has been lengthy discussion of this problem on Apple's support forums.

Apple has released Sonic The Hedgehog for the iPod (iTunes link).

The $4.99 game, made by Sega, is available for all iPods that are game-compatible, including the 3rd generation iPod Nano, the 5th generation iPod, and iPod Classic.

The original ground-breaking title makes its debut on the iPod! Rocket Sonic, the fastest blue hedgehog on earth, through hair-raising loop-de-loops and dizzying dives past pubbling lava, waterfalls and on as you gather up Rings and stop Dr.Eggman's schemes for world domination!

Sonic the Hedgehog was a popular platform game that first made its appearance for the Sega Genesis game system. LimeiBook86 has posted a Youtube video of the game in action.

See Also: Sonic The Hedgehog Wikipedia

Apple has issued security updates for Mac OS X 10.5.1, 10.4.11 (PPC), and 10.4.1 (Universal) today. The individual packages affected are listed:

Mac OS X 10.5.1: Core Foundation, CUPS, Flash Player Plug-in, Launch Services, perl, python, Quick Look, ruby, Safari, Samba, Shockwave Plug-in, Spin Tracer

Mac OS X 10.4.11: Address Book, CUPS, ColorSync, Core Foundation, Desktop Services, Flash Player Plug-in, gnutar, iChat, IO Storage Family, Launch Services, Mail, perl, python, ruby, Samba, Safari, Shockwave Plug-in, SMB, Spotlight, tcpdump, XQuery

A detailed breakdown of the security fixes is not yet available available on Apple's site. The updates are recommended for all users.