MacRumors

Apple has released the long-anticipated 8-core Mac Pro. The update keeps current configurations but adds a top of the line 8-core 3 GHz model for $1498 additional beyond the base 2.66 Quad-core model.

Interestingly, at the current time the model is only available in the US and Canada, although this may simply reflect a lag time in Apple updating localized versions of Apple's website.

The new model is available for shipping in 3-5 business days for basic configurations from the US Apple Store.

Update: The 8-core configuration has been added to the international stores. Pricing can be found on the online Apple Stores, e.g. United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Japan.

Apple sent out teaser emails to individuals who signed up for more information from Apple about the iPhone:

Apple writes:

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for signing up. You'll be the first to hear the latest about iPhone-- coming this June. That gives you just enough time to think of ways to break the news to your current phone.

AP News reports on a possible probe into Apple's online music store:

The Financial Times said Apple and several major music companies had been sent a "statement of objections" alleging that the deals underpinning the sale of music through iTunes in Europe might violate competition rules.

The charges are centered around the fact that iTunes limits sales to country-specific borders, rather than one central European music store.

Apple, however, maintains that this is due to record label restrictions:

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said the company wanted to operate a single store for all of Europe, but music labels and publishers said there were limits to the rights that could they could grant to Apple.

"We don't believe Apple did anything to violate EU law," he said. "We will continue to work with the EU to resolve this matter."

Yesterday's joint announcement from Apple and EMI remains the big news. To recap:

- EMI's Music will be sold without Digital Rights Management restrictions through iTunes
- These new songs will be higher quality (256kbps) and sell for $1.29/song individually
- DRM-Restricted songs at the lower quality settings (128kbps) will still be sold for $.99
- Albums will be in the new higher quality/DRM-less format but remain at the same price.

A full transcript of the Q&A session from the announcement is now available.

Microsoft-Watch notes that the deal greatly impacts Microsoft in that they bet big on Digital Rights Manangement.

With the release of Windows Media 9, Microsoft made a huge bet on DRM. No question, Windows Media 9 delivered highly flexible rights management that could be used for lots of interesting marketing purposes, such as a label releasing a new album with, say, three free plays. But Microsoft's bet hasn't paid off in the market, even with so many music stores using Windows Media DRM.

PC Mag cites the response from the Norwegian Consumer Council, who had previously declared Apple's DRM restrictions to be illegal and tried to pass legistation to force open standards:

"No matter how the digital music market develops, today will always stand out [as] a very important date, the day when two of the really big market players finally took responsibility that follows from the position and made an interoperable solution available to consumers," said Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor to the Norwegian Consumer Council, in an email. "I applaud their move, and encourage all the other contenders in the digital music business to make the same important move."

Gizmodo offers some additional details behind today's announcement that EMI would be selling their music without Digital Rights Management.

A few of the more interesting tidbits from Jeanne Meyer, EMI's Senior VP of Corporate Communications:

EMI approached Apple about DRM free tracks, not the other way around.
EMI is cool with any other music store doing DRM-free tracks. This is not an iTunes exclusive.
Those stores can put songs in any format they want. The iTunes premium price and AAC 256 kbps format are Apple's Marketing decision.
EMI made this move based on research that showed consumers want DRM-free tracks.
They're doing this to get a bigger stake in online music, believing that even though CDs are 90% of their sales, those figures will shrink or stay flat. They're projecting that online sales should rise to to 25% of their sales by 2010.
The DRM-free tracks should, they believe improve sales: Even as piracy gets easier, so does the ability to play songs on any MP3 player available. (That is, once some other music store releases EMI tracks on MP3.)

Apple and EMI will be holding a joint press conference at 1pm London time, 8am EDT, to discuss "an exciting new digital offering."

Late last week, a MacRumors source indicated that the event would revolve around the removal of Digital Rights Management (DRM) from EMI tracks in the iTunes store. Unverifiable at the time, we did not publish the information until yesterday, which has since been echoed from the Wall Street Journal.

We will update this story periodically throughout the event as new information becomes available.

Audio Webcast

Confirmed: DRM-free Music: MacRumors user stomer has found slides from further in the webcast that confirm that the announcement will revolve around "DRM-free tracks at twice the sound quality."

EMI Press Release
Apple Press Release

Updates (Time is EDT, Chronological Order)
- 7:53am Audio Feed has become available
- 8:02 Music playing over audio feed now
- 8:06 Greetings...
- 8:09 Going to have to be patient a bit longer... live performances first.
- 8:10 Performance by The Good, The Bad, and The Queen
- 8:23 We are focused on giving the consumers a truly compelling experience
- 8:24 Our research indicates that consumers are willing to pay a higher price in order to play their music on any player.
- 8:24 Announcing premium downloads. Free from DRM, and higher sound quality.
- 8:25 Upgrade ability as well.
- From press release: $1.29 for premium tracks (DRM-less), $.99 for standard (DRM), and $.30 for upgrade
- 8:28 Steve takes stage.
- 8:29 "Next stage in the digital music revolution"
- 8:31 Premium tracks will be 256 kbps AAC
- 8:32 Available next month (May)
- From press release: All EMI music videos will also be available on the iTunes Store DRM-free with no change in price.
- 8:35 End of formal conference, begin of Q/A

- Q: When are the Beatles coming?
- A: Don't know yet.

- Q: You mentioned 2.5 million tracks available by year end... obviously that isn't just EMI...
- A: (Steve) Yes... that is our projection for other labels coming on board as well.

- Q: Now that the link between iTunes/iPod is broken, do you expect a decline in iPod sales?
- A: (Steve) I don't see a link, because you have always been able to buy music from elsewhere (CD's) and put it on your iPod. We're going to keep working to do the best job at what we do, and we are going to hope that consumers agree.

- Q: What's the point on keeping DRM on standard tracks?
- A: (Steve) We don't want to force-raise the price on anyone.

ThinkSecret reports that Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will ship in June 2007. This would bring it just within Apple's official "Spring 2007" release date.

The rumor site hints that Leopard will indeed include some surprises, but no details are available:

"Leopard is shaping up to be a more significant release than anyone expected, with much more to come than any of the developer builds have led on," one source said.

Updates to iLife and iWork are also expected alongside Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) but that they may be rebranded as "iLife Leopard" and "iWork Leopard", dropping the calendar-year naming convention of the previous versions.

Macworld.co.uk is reporting that Apple and EMI will be hosting a joint announcement on Monday, April 2nd.

The press invite reads:

Please join EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli at EMIs headquarters on Monday 2 April at 1pm London/8am New York time to hear about an exciting new digital offering, with special guest, Apple CEO Steve Jobs."

A special live performance from an unannounced artist will also take place.

Late last week, MacRumors had heard rumblings that Steve Jobs and EMI would jointly announce the dropping of Digital Rights Management for EMI's music associated with iTunes. We were unable to confirm, so we were unable to publish, but this invitation certainly adds credence to this story.

EMI has previously been rumored to have been considering dropping Digital Rights Management from their music. Add to this, Steve Jobs plea to the industry to stop forcing Digital Rights Manangement.

Macworld.co.uk speculates that this may also relate to the rumored Beatles / iTunes distribution partnership, but no new rumors on this have emerged.

(Note: This story is not an April Fools joke.)

Update: Reuters.co.uk confirms that a Beatles announcement is not likely according to their source:

"There is no Beatles' announcement," the source said.

Update 2: The Wall Street Journal confirms that the announcement will relate to removing Digital Rights Manangement:

In a major reversal of the music industry's longstanding antipiracy strategy, EMI Group PLC is set to announce Monday that it plans to sell significant amounts of its catalog without anticopying software, according to people familiar with the matter.

The London-based music company is to make its announcement in a press conference that will feature Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs. EMI is to sell songs without the software -- known as digital rights management, or DRM -- through Apple's iTunes Store and possibly through other online outlets, too.

Today is April 1, 2007 and represents April Fool's Day -- so readers should be wary of hoaxes and claims at both news and rumor sites today.

Today also represents Apple's 31st Anniversary. Last year's April Fools' was met with much of anticipation. Many were certain that Apple would celebrate their 30th anniversary with some form of announcement. No announcements were made.

Enjoy the day!

AppleTVHacks posts a tutorial showing how to boot full Mac OS X on the Apple TV, along with keyboard and mouse support.

At this time, the 14 step hack requires opening the Apple TV, installing Mac OS X on the hard drive, and modifying some Operating System files.

It does, however, represent the ability to convert a $299 Apple TV into (what appears to be) a full Mac OS X machine. They also point to a Video as proof of the hack.

According to apcmag.com, Microsoft's Office 2008 for Mac has proceeded into private beta stages of development (note: mirror may be slow).

"We're in private betas right now" confirmed Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing Manager for Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (MacBU), during an exclusive interview with APC magazine.

Microsoft announced Office 2008 for Mac at Macworld San Francisco in January, and previewed an alpha release which included features from Office 2007 for Windows such as the Ribbon, and new Mac-only features such as a Publishing Layout View that will allow Word users to create layout-rich documents (newsletters, fliers, and brochures), Ledger Sheets in Excel, and "My Day" priority tracking in Entourage.

"Part of our mission with Office 2008 is to expose all the things that are already there and make the product easier to use" says Jones. "We wanted to make it more discoverable, to bubble up the features that people didn't always find. We also have an opportunity to have a simple UI and a more intuitive interface.

"We got a lot of customer feedback (on the UI), we've kept the menus and embedded toolbars, but I can hide rid of embedded toolbars to have a really streamlined interface."

Parts of the redesign are peeking through almost every application, as well as application modules such as the notebook view in Word, and Jones promises that there's plenty to share in the months ahead.

Microsoft has stated that Office 2008 will be a Universal Binary, and will bring compatibility with Office 2007 for Windows' Open XML file format. To the dismay of many corporate and cross-platform users, however, Microsoft has said that it will not be supporting Visual Basic scripting.

CNet's Gadgets Blog claims that Cingular has confirmed the release date of the Apple iPhone.

Now Cingular is confirming that the release date will be June 11. A customer service manager at Cingular (we called 800-947-5096 and were transferred to sales) gave us that date late Thursday, but, alas, said he didn't have any additional information beyond that.

While Cingular Customer Service is not likely the best source of inside-Apple information, the date does correspond with the start of Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference.

Apple has officially stated that the iPhone will be released in "June 2007".

MacTechNews.de notes an interesting blurb on Apple's Creative Suite 3 promo page:

In it, Apple claims:

Every new Mac features powerful dual-core or quad-core Intel processors, the world's most advanced operating system, and more.

At this time there are no Quad-Core Intel processors being used in any Macs, however, they may simply be referring to Quad-Core Mac Pros, which do contain two Dual-Core Intel Processors. Apple UK's store had previously had a more revealing slip up with the claims of "8-core processing power" on Mac Pros -- which they quickly corrected.

Rumors of Apple's use of Quad-core processors began in November 2006, with expectations that an 8-Core Mac Pro was coming soon.

Update: Apple has changed the text to "Every new Mac features powerful dual-core or quad-core Intel processing"

Apple introduced two new features in iTunes today.

My Alerts (iTunes Link)

A custom page on iTunes which lists "recent releases from artists whose work you've purchased on iTunes." Apple also allows you to sign up to receive Email notifications of these alerts.

Complete My Album (iTunes Link)

Perhaps more exciting is the "Complete My Album" feature which was previously rumored late last year.

"Complete My Album" allows customers to purchase the remainder of an album for a discounted price.

Did you know that if you've purchased one or more songs from an eligible album, you may now be able to buy the rest of the album at a reduced price? You have up to six months after first downloading a song from an eligible album to purchase the remainder of the album.

The reasoning behind this strategy is to provide more incentives to customers to purchase full albums -- or at least not penalize them for buying singles ahead of time. Previously, if you purchased a single song from iTunes ($.99) and later bought the full album ($9.99), you were charged twice for that song. This new feature helps avoid that scenario -- at least for certain albums and for a limited period of time.

Intel today released some details on its next-generation 45 nanometer chips (code-named Penryn) due later this year.

Penryn, the next chip family to be based on the Core micro-architecture, will include the following enhancements (among others):

- Speeds in excess of 3 GHz
- Dual-core L2 cache of 6 MB, Quad-core L2 cache of 12 MB
- Intel Virtualization Technology speed enhancements
- SSE4
- Enhanced Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology: when one core sleeps, a still-active core will get a performance boost (single-threaded applications will see a boost).
- Deep Power Down Technology: "significantly reduces the power of the processor during idle periods such that internal transistor power leakage is no longer a factor. This helps extend battery life in laptops."

Intel currently has 15 Penryn-based chips lined up. The upcoming Penryn chips will be marketed under both the "Core" and "Xeon" brand names with dual core mobile processors, dual and quad-core desktop processors, and dual and quad-core server processors.

Apple will likely only select a few models to include in its lineup. Apple currently uses the Core Duo "Yonah" in the Mac Mini, Core 2 Duo "Merom" in the iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro, and the Xeon 51xx "Woodcrest" in its Mac Pro and Xserve. Recurring rumors (1, 2, 3) of an upgraded Mac Pro utilizing Xeon 53xx "Clovertown" 4-core chips have yet to come to fruition.

In addition, Intel gives a glimpse towards its future next-generation Nehalem architecture. While Nehalem is still a ways off with initial production set for early 2008, Intel says that the architecture will see a rebirth of Hyperthreading, incorporate caching advances, and will scale to 8 cores and beyond.