MacRumors

Apple released three updates via Mac OS X's Software Update today.

iPhoto 7.1.2
This update addresses issues when publishing photos to a .Mac Web Gallery, improves overall stability, and fixes a number of other minor issues.

ProKit 4.5
This update improves reliability for Apple's professional applications and is recommended for all users of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express, Aperture, Logic Studio and Logic Express.

Braille Display Update 1.0
Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard includes a powerful screen reading technology for the blind called VoiceOver that supports a variety of refreshable Braille displays. When you have a supported Braille display connected to your computer, VoiceOver automatically detects it and sends it information about what is displayed on the screen. This installer adds support in Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard for additional refreshable Braille displays.

Canalys reported on both U.S. and Q4 2007 mobile phone marketshare numbers today and listed Apple's iPhone as #3 (6.5%) in smart phone marketshare worldwide despite being only available in a few countries. Apple trailed Nokia (52.9%) and RIM (11.4%) who were #1 and #2, respectively, in the worldwide market.

Meanwhile, Canalys estimates that Apple is #2 in U.S. marketshare with 28%, behind RIM (41%). This put the iPhone ahead of both Palm (9%) and all Windows Mobile device vendors combined (21%).

During the Macworld Expo keynote speech, Jobs reported that the Apple iPhone won 19.5% of the smart phone market during the 3rd quarter of 2007, so this 28% marketshare in Q4 represents signficant growth in the second full quarter the iPhone has been on sale.

Today, Apple introduced a 16GB version of the iPhone.

Apple today added new models of the iPhone and iPod touch which have double the memory. The new 16GB iPhone is available for $499, while the 8GB model remains at $399. The 32GB iPod touch comes in at $499 while 16GB and 8GB models are priced at $399 and $299, respectively.

"For some users, there's never enough memory," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of Worldwide iPod and iPhone Product Marketing. "Now people can enjoy even more of their music, photos and videos on the most revolutionary mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world."

The new iPhone and iPod touch models are available immediately.

Apple has fixed some issues with Time Machine and AFP X Client and bumped Mac OS X 10.5.2 to build 9C30. The latest Mac OS X seed was released to developer's today, only four days behind 9C27. There are "no known issues" in this latest seed.

It seems clear that Apple is putting the finishing touches on Mac OS X, with accelerated developer releases in the hopes of reaching the final build. Due to the continuous bug fixing process, it impossible to predict the release date of the next update to Mac OS X. Historically, however, Apple has released the final build as quickly as one day following the last developer seed (9B18 seeded, 9B18 released).

At this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference, Intel is giving additional details regarding its upcoming Silverthorne ultra-mobile processor (via News.com and AppleInsider).

According to the reports, Silverthorne will include dual in-order pipelines in order to keep power consumption at a minimal .5-2 Watts. Most modern chips use out of order pipelines for performance benefits, but at the cost of power. Nevertheless, AppleInsider says that the chip is expected to be as powerful as early Pentium M processors. Additionally, the processor will support hyperthreading and be fully compatible with the Core 2 Duo which powers current Macs.

Apple has been rumored to be adopting Silverthorne for their next generation iPhone or PDA platforms. Silverthorne is expected to ship in the first half of 2008.

One report lists Apple amongst possible companies that are considering rival offers for Yahoo after Microsoft issued a public bid of $44.6 billion for the company last week. Part of the hesitation is reportedly Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang, being reluctant to join Microsoft.

It is believed [Yang] would be particularly open to a rescue bid from Steve Jobs' Apple Corp, having openly expressed his admiration for the firm in the past. Yang last year invited Jobs to Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale to give a motivational talk to staff.

While Apple does have $16 billion in the bank, representatives from other companies have already expressed reluctance to place a bid for Yahoo against Microsoft, who could easily top their bids. Meanwhile, it appears Google has been playing an active role in trying to hinder this move. Google CEO Eric Schmidt personally phoned Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to offer assistance in fending off a Microsoft acquisision.

Banc of America sources (via iLounge) in Asia claim that Apples desktop and notebook production numbers have been increased by 20% from Apple's early January estimates, suggesting stronger than expected demand for Apple's computers.

Firm believes production numbers should continue to move up throughout the quarter. MacBook Air orders also increased slightly for March, contributing to the upside. They continue to believe that desktops and notebooks are the key driver of the story.

Meanwhile, iPod production numbers are said to be significantly reduced by 10-20% from early January's estimates, suggesting slower demand than expected for the popular music player.

Recent outlooks have suggested growth in Apple's Mac marketshare, and the latest Net Applications numbers (methodology) from January 2008 reveal that the Mac had a 7.57% browser marketshare. This is up from 7.31% in December 2007.

A few news items about MacRumors itself:

- Please take our survey (Update: Survey Over) to help with our advertising inventory and sales.
- We've opened a new Mac OS X Server & Xserve forum for issues related to Apple's server products (both hardware and software)
- The MacBook Air forum remains quite active.
- The AJAX Forum Spy remains the fastest way to keep up with the forum.
- A reminder that we provide RSS feeds for various aspects of the site:MacRumors Front Page,Page 2, iPhone Blog

With the introduction of the MacBook Air, Apple offered a new mass storage option for the first time -- Solid State Drives (SSD). The Solid State Drive takes the place of the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) as the place to store your files. Being based on NAND Flash ram, SSD boasts the advantages of being more reliable, using less battery and being faster in certain circumstances.

Intel and Micron announced last week that they have developed a new high-speed NAND flash chip which can reach speeds up to 200 Megabytes/second reads and 100 Megabytes/second writes. Conventional Single-Level-Cell Flash memory is reportedly limited to 40 Megabytes/second reads and 20 Megabytes/second writes.

Mass production of an 8GB Solid State Drive based on the technology is expected by the end of 2008. This "high-speed" drive is expected to carry a significant premium and will first be targeted at the professional market.

Meanwhile, for general consumers, prices on more conventional NAND flash appears to be falling, with prices dropping as much as 75% since August 2007. The dropping price of NAND Flash made the offering of SSD possible in the MacBook Air, though still at premium prices. These price drops should also trickle down to Apple's other Flash-based products, such as the iPhone and iPod Touch. The iPhone has been rumored to be due for a revision sometime this year, with the possibilities of increased storage and the introduction of 3G networking.

Last week, we'd heard an unconfirmed report that three new MacBook Pro models had appeared in Best Buy's inventory tracking system. Some inventory screenshots (1, 2) we received today appear to confirm this earlier report, showing off the upcoming $1999 price point MacBook Pro (name cut off in image).

Information found in early inventory tracking systems, however, is difficult to rely on, as many of the details may be "best guess" placeholders only. For what its worth, these new SKUs come with the exact same price points as current MacBook Pros ($1999, $2499, $2799) and show an in-stock date of February 10th, 2008.

This date adds to a laundry list of other possible dates (Feb 5th, Feb 12th, Mar 17th) that have been trickling in on our Page 2. Unfortunately, this new date is likely an estimate, but does reflect expectations of an imminent MacBook Pro release.

Though we aren't familiar with the workings of Best Buy's inventory system, we presume they have some reason to believe that the systems are coming. In contrast, Amazon notoriously posted placeholders for iWork '07 and iLife '07 ahead of Macworld Expo based purely on speculation. Apple, of course, skipped iWork '07 and iLife '07 versions and went straight to '08 versions eight months later.

While the new MacBook Pros will likely incorporate only modest updates (Penryn and Multi-Touch), with their imminent release, its hard to justify the purchase of the current 8 month old models.

Many readers are reporting shipments and delivery in our MacBook Air forum. First impressions and notes of the MacBook Air are being compiled in this thread.

Few head to head comparisons between the Solid State Drive (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) versions of the MacBook Air have yet been posted, but one reader (Ben Drawbaugh) did run Xbench 1.3 on the Apple Store's demo 1.8GHz SSD model. We've compiled those results along with earlier 1.6GHz HDD benchmarks in the following table.

Overall, the results of the 1.8Ghz SSD are as expected. The 1.8GHz processor gives a small boost in CPU performance. The SSD option, however, gives the most dramatic speed increases in non-sequential file reading since there is no physical drive head to move. As expected, the SSD is slightly slower at sequential file writing, but the low seek time makes up for this when performing non-sequential writes.

Typical examples of "sequential" writes and reads are when you are loading a very large file into memory or saving it out to the drive. Non-sequential reads/writes are more common when accessing a number of different small files that may be scattered across the drive (such as booting).

A traditional hard drive has a spinning platter over which the "head" moves. In order to access different files, the head may have to physically move to reach the file. The time it takes to physical move the head contributes to the seek time. SSD drives are closer to RAM and have no physical parts to move when accessing.

The SSD MacBook Air is also expected to offer a better battery life than the HDD version, though the magnitude of this effect is unknown. The SSD upgrade is a $999 option in the MacBook Air.

CNBC reports that Microsoft has made a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo for $44.6 billion in stock and cash.

"We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected," Microsoft told Yahoo in a letter.

"While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo that we are proposing," it said.

Microsoft's press release provides some more details:

Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure, said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.

We've had reports of several Apple Stores setting up their MacBook Air displays overnight, confirming that today (Friday) is the retail launch of the MacBook Air.

New York City's 5th Avenue store is open 24 hours and they had their MacBook Airs back on display as of midnight. They were not yet selling MacBook Airs, however.

Individual store stock may vary, so readers should contact their local stores for availability.

Meanwhile, iFixit provides a detailed disassembly of the MacBook Air. The breakdown takes the MacBook Air down to its components, and shows off how to remove the internal hard drive.

A few interesting notes:

- A hard drive swap is definitely possible, but it's no longer a trivial procedure as in the MacBook.
- iFixit expects that 3rd party replacement batteries will be available soon.
- Same multi-touch controller chip as the iPhone and iPod touch.

In possibly one of the more ambitious outlooks for Mac market-share increases, Gartner is forecasting that Apple will double its market-share in the US and Western Europe by 2011. The reason for the dramatic increase is said to be two-fold: Apple continues to do well in its Macintosh unit and competitors aren't meeting Apple's competitive pressure.

Apple is challenging its competitors with software integration that provides ease of use and flexibility; continuous and more frequent innovation in hardware and software; and an ecosystem that focuses on interoperability across multiple devices (such as iPod and iMac cross-selling).

Gartner also predicts that by 2012, 50% of traveling workers will use devices other than notebooks. Gartner cites new "Internet-centric pocketable devices at the sub-$400 level" as a primary threat to the notebook in this arena. Notably, the iPhone fits this description.